Beginning with commit 879f3af in January 2025, I have been using uutils on my NixOS machines.
Uutils is a Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils and the experience has been nothing but wonderful. I’ve encountered zero bugs, and everything is snappy.1
How to enable it?
For NixOS, the process is quite easy. You can simply add the non-prefixed versions to your system’s packages. These binaries are then used in place of the GNU coreutils:
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
uutils-coreutils-noprefix
uutils-diffutils
uutils-findutils
];
Other Linux distributions should consider trying oxidizr.
Generally, you won’t notice a speed difference as most disk I/O is sequential. ↩︎