uutils is no longer just a development experiment - it is running in production at some of the largest software organisations in the world. This page documents known adopters and how they use our tools.
Canonical / Ubuntu
Canonical is progressively replacing GNU coreutils with uutils across Ubuntu. Canonical laid out the roadmap in March 2025 in Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu.
The rollout:
| Release | Status |
|---|---|
| Ubuntu 25.10 | uutils coreutils ships as default - real-world testing before the LTS |
| Ubuntu 26.04 LTS | rust-coreutils 0.8.0 included; cp, mv, rm remain GNU pending 8 TOCTOU fixes found in audit |
| Ubuntu 26.10 | Target for 100% rust-coreutils |
To support this transition, Canonical commissioned a two-phase security audit with Zellic (December 2025 – March 2026). The audit found and resolved 113 issues in total, all reported back to the uutils upstream. The full report is available at github.com/Zellic/publications.
A Canonical engineer also created oxidizr, a tool that lets users on Ubuntu 24.04+ switch to uutils today - replacing GNU binaries with uutils symlinks, reversibly, in one command.
Links:
- Discourse: Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu
- Discourse: Migration to rust-coreutils in 25.10
- Discourse: An update on rust-coreutils (April 2026)
- github.com/jnsgruk/oxidizr
- LWN.net coverage
Microsoft
Microsoft ships uutils coreutils as Coreutils for Windows, a native Windows distribution of uutils/coreutils, uutils/findutils, and a Microsoft fork of uutils/grep. It was announced at Microsoft Build 2026 (June 2, 2026) as part of Windows becoming a first-class development platform.
The distribution is available today via:
winget install Microsoft.CoreutilsThe stated goal is to make moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows frictionless: the same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts carry over without translation.
Microsoft maintains the downstream packaging at github.com/microsoft/coreutils. The uutils/coreutils project is the upstream - Microsoft builds from it directly and does not rewrite the tools.
Links:
- Windows Developer Blog - Build 2026 announcement
- Microsoft Learn - Coreutils for Windows overview
- github.com/microsoft/coreutils
Snap Inc. (SPECS AR glasses)
Snap Inc. ships Snap OS - the proprietary Linux-based operating system powering the SPECS augmented reality glasses announced at Augmented World Expo 2026 - built on Yocto/OpenEmbedded.
A Snap engineer has been the primary contributor and maintainer
of the uutils-coreutils recipe in the meta-openembedded (meta-oe) layer
since Yocto 4.1 (langdale). The recipe uses PROVIDES = "coreutils" so uutils
acts as a transparent drop-in replacement for GNU coreutils in embedded images.
Links:
- SPECS AR glasses announcement
- uutils-coreutils recipe on OpenEmbedded Layer Index
- Patches on the Yocto mailing list
Debian
Debian has packaged uutils coreutils since Debian 12 (Bookworm) and is actively tracking upstream releases.
Debian is also following Ubuntu's path toward making uutils the default. A Google Summer of Code 2024 project - "Improve support of the Rust coreutils in Debian" - was mentored to accelerate the integration. The package is also inherited by downstream Debian-based distributions including Raspbian, Kali Linux, Parrot OS, PureOS, and deepin 23.
Links:
Alpine Linux
Alpine Linux packages uutils coreutils in its community repository (Alpine 3.19+, now at 0.9.0 in Alpine Edge / 3.24). What makes Alpine particularly notable is the depth of adoption: 29 downstream Alpine packages already declare a dependency on uutils-coreutils, including lvm2, netdata, dracut, Pi-hole, and openvas-scanner.
When both uutils-coreutils and coreutils are installed, Alpine's package
manager automatically purges the GNU binaries and replaces them with uutils
symlinks.
Links:
Redox OS
Redox OS, the microkernel operating system written entirely in Rust, uses uutils as its coreutils layer. The Redox Book states it plainly: "Redox uses the Rust implementation of the GNU Coreutils, uutils." Redox is also listed as an officially supported platform in the uutils codebase.
VS Code for the Web
Microsoft VS Code for the Web (vscode.dev) uses uutils coreutils compiled
to WebAssembly/WASI to power the shell commands (ls, cat, date, etc.)
available in the browser-based terminal. This was documented in the official
VS Code blog in June 2023 and represents one of the first large-scale
production deployments of uutils in a WASM context.
Links:
Buildroot
Buildroot, the widely-used embedded Linux build
system, ships an official uutils-coreutils package since April 2025.
This brings uutils into the reach of a vast ecosystem of IoT, industrial, and embedded devices built with Buildroot.
Apertus
Apertus builds the AXIOM Beta, an open-source professional cinema camera. Their firmware build system runs on Ubuntu hosts and was updated in December 2025 to support uutils coreutils as the host toolchain.
This makes Apertus one of the first hardware projects to explicitly track and maintain uutils compatibility in their build system.
Links:
Fedora / RHEL / EPEL
uutils coreutils is packaged in Fedora since F39/F40 (as rust-coreutils,
renamed to uutils-coreutils in Fedora 42). It is available in Fedora
42, 43, 44 and Rawhide at version 0.7.0, and in EPEL 9 and EPEL 10 - making
it available to Red Hat Enterprise Linux users. Fedora is not planning to make
it the default in the near term but maintains the package actively.
uutils is also packaged in OpenMandriva (all branches) and Apertis (the Debian-based embedded automotive Linux distro, v2023–v2027).
Links:
NixOS
uutils coreutils is available in nixpkgs as uutils-coreutils and
uutils-coreutils-noprefix (the latter installs commands without the uu-
prefix, as drop-in replacements).
Links:
macOS
uutils is available on macOS via two package managers:
- Homebrew:
brew install uutils-coreutils - MacPorts:
port install coreutils-uutils
This makes uutils a practical cross-platform development tool: scripts written with uutils on Linux run identically on macOS developer machines without depending on GNU coreutils via Homebrew.
Windows (community)
Beyond Microsoft's official distribution, uutils is available on Windows via:
- MSYS2 (all variants): 0.9.0
- Scoop:
scoop install uutils-coreutils - Chocolatey:
choco install uutils-coreutils
Termux (Android) and ChromeOS
- Termux User Repository (TUR): uutils-coreutils 0.9.0 is available for Android terminals via Termux.
- Chromebrew: ChromeOS users can install uutils-coreutils via the Chromebrew package manager.
Are you using uutils?
If your project or organisation uses uutils tools, we would love to hear from you. Open an issue or pull request on github.com/uutils/uutils.github.io to add your entry to this page.