# reverting to GNU coreutils and sudo on ubuntu 26.04

---

okay actually i use lubuntu but like same difference.

the other day i upgraded from 24.04 to 26.04— i completely YOLO'd it, by
the way, and somehow didn't break anything except a bit of my desktop
theming— and look, guys, i tried to get used to these newfangled rust
coreutils ("uutils") and sudo, but i just couldn't do it. i hated seeing
my password as i entered it when running `sudo`. i did not like my tools
behaving slightly differently than they did before the change. i will
say, at least, that the new `apt` interface is kinda nice.

but yeah i just hate any sort of change when using my computer. so i
reverted!

it was kind of annoying trying to find guidance on how to do this? like,
i found it after 5 minutes, don't get me wrong. it wasn't *that* hard.
but it's kinda wild to me that canonical didn't provide any guidance on
reverting the change with their uutils documentation. but whatever, i
found it on stack overflow (my beloved).

## here's how to do it

disclaimer: i am not responsible if you break your system in the process
of doing this. you can always reinstall idk man

### coreutils

it's pretty much just two commands for coreutils:

```bash
# remove new uutils
sudo apt-get remove coreutils-from-uutils --allow-remove-essential

# reinstall GNU coreutils
sudo apt install coreutils-from-gnu
```

i got a conflict error a few times while i was doing this, but i think
that was due to uutils being present, so i'm half sure you have to
uninstall it first.

after GNU coreutils is installed, i'd verify the versions of tools like
`cat` and `ls` just to be sure:

```bash
ls --version

cat --version
```

### sudo

you don't have to reinstall original sudo i think? like it was already
on my system, just renamed to `/usr/bin/sudo.ws`. in that case, all you
have to do is run `update-alternatives`:

```bash
sudo update-alternatives --config sudo
```

enter the number corresponding to `sudo.ws`, and that should become the
default.

okay that's it. if anyone broke their system following this post it's
not my fault. live laugh love and learn