Ubuntu's Next Rust Effort May See OpenPGP Replaced By Sequoia PGP

Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP.

As previously covered on Phoronix, with Ubuntu 26.10 they reached the 100% transition for Rust Coreutils with now moving cp, mv, and rm usage over to Rust Coreutils rather than GNU Coreutils. The new upstream Rust Coreutils 0.12 release brings a number of improvements too for this GNU Coreutils alternative.

The Ubuntu Discourse post also noted that with Ubuntu 26.10, Sequoia PGP is available in the repository as a modern amd memory-safe alternative to OpenPGP:

"Also new in Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” is Sequoia PGP, a modern and memory-safe OpenPGP implementation written in Rust. Sequoia PGP provides the sq and sqv commands as counterparts to GNU Privacy Guard’s gpg and gpgv commands. In the future, Sequoia PGP may become Ubuntu’s default OpenPGP toolchain, maintaining OpenPGP interoperability while moving to a modern memory-safe implementation."

So for Ubuntu 26.10, OpenPGP is the default but they are looking at Sequoia PGP for future Ubuntu Linux releases where it "may" become the default OpenPGP toolchain.

Those wishing to learn more can see the Ubuntu 26.10 Rust update via Ubuntu Discourse.