Ubuntu 2025: Rust Push, Perf Gains, and 25.10 Hurdles

• Canonical accelerated migration to Rust system components (sudo-rs, Rust Coreutils) across Ubuntu 25.10.
• Rust transitions uncovered performance regressions, unattended-upgrade breakage, and two sudo-rs vulnerabilities.
• Canonical advanced ARM64 desktop ISOs, x86_64-v3 builds, Multipass open sourcing, and Java investment.
• Ubuntu 26.04 LTS remains the focal point; Canonical exceeded $300M revenue in 2024.

Overview: Why 2025 mattered for Ubuntu

2025 was a transitional year for Ubuntu as Canonical pushed memory-safe Rust into core system tooling ahead of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

The move aimed to improve security and long-term maintainability but produced short-term compatibility and performance trade-offs during the Ubuntu 25.10 development cycle.

Rust system tools: progress and pain points

sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils adoption

Canonical began shipping sudo-rs as the default sudo implementation in Ubuntu 25.10 daily ISOs and planned wider use of the uutils Rust Coreutils.

The goal is to reduce memory-safety risks and modernize system binaries using Rust tooling and practices.

Security and reliability issues

Two moderate security vulnerabilities were reported in sudo-rs, prompting urgent attention from Ubuntu developers.

Separately, a Rust Coreutils bug broke unattended-upgrades functionality, affecting automatic security updates on 25.10 testing images.

Compatibility and performance

Transitioning to Rust Coreutils exposed breakage for some executables that rely on specific GNU Coreutils behaviors, such as Makeself archives failing checksum validation.

Early Rust Coreutils performance lagged behind GNU Coreutils, though upstream uutils 0.2 later reported “massive” gains aiming for production readiness.

Other engineering and platform moves

Compiler optimizations and architecture variants

Canonical investigated -O3 compiler optimizations but decided against applying -O3 universally, publishing engineering rationale for selective use.

Ubuntu 25.10 also introduced architecture variants like x86_64-v3 packages to leverage modern Intel/AMD CPU features.

ARM64, Snapdragon, and desktop experience

Work continued on improving ARM64 installs with the new "Stubble" enhancements for the generic desktop ISO.

Canonical published concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops to better support the growing ARM laptop ecosystem.

Open source and ecosystem updates

Multipass became fully open-source, and Canonical signaled increased investment in OpenJDK for Ubuntu.

The company’s 2024 annual report showed nearly $300M in revenue and over 1,100 employees, underscoring enterprise momentum.

What to watch

Expect continued refinement of Rust tooling, fixes for sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils issues, and stabilization work ahead of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

Canonical’s decisions on optimizations, architecture variants, and ARM/Qualcomm hardware support will shape Ubuntu’s desktop and server experience in 2026.