Fedora News Archives

Following some release delays the past few weeks, it's been decided today that Fedora Linux 39 is now ready to ship next week.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available.

While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November.

Fedora 39 failed to make its "early" release target date, it didn't meet its otherwise targeted release date one week later, and is now facing another possible setback still. These release delays have been due to outstanding blocker bugs all related to the Raspberry Pi.

Fedora Linux is looking at possibly transitioning from Zlib to Zlib-NG for this widely-used compression library. This tentative change request is filed in part by Intel software engineers looking to enhance the Zlib performance on modern processors.

The beta release of Fedora 39 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release prior to the end of October.

In addition to Fedora 40 planning to ship KDE Plasma 6.0 and without any X11 session support, Fedora stakeholders are also looking at shipping GNOME for the Fedora Workstation 40 release without any X11 session support.

Fedora developers are looking at offering KDE Plasma 6.0 and KDE Frameworks 6 in next year's Fedora 40 release. With the upgrade to Plasma 6 it's also planned by the Fedora packagers to drop support for the KDE X11 session -- thereby just leaving the KDE on Wayland session.

Fedora with their more liberal update policies will soon be rolling out the Thunderbird 115 mail client to stable Fedora Linux users.

Fedora Workstation has long maintained the QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt projects for applying a GNOME/GTK-like interface and styling to Qt applications in order to enhance the experience. However, to reduce the maintenance burden and the ongoing technical debt, Fedora Workstation 39 is planning to eliminate the custom Qt theming and just rely on Qt upstream.

It shouldn't come as much surprise for those familiar with Fedora given its tendency to always ship with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components, but this autumn's release of Fedora 39 will once again have all the leading-edge GNU compiler pieces.

Asahi Linux is great for those wanting to run the best Linux experience on Apple Silicon hardware while using this Arch Linux based distribution. But for those preferring Fedora Linux over Arch, a Fedora Asahi Remix is coming and was announced today at the Flock To Fedora conference.

For over a year Fedora / Red Hat has been planning for major package management changes with DNF5. The hope for months has been to use DNF5 by default for Fedora 39 but that is no longer going to work out... FESCo has decided to reject DNF5 for Fedora 39 and then due to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 branching with Fedora 40, this means DNF5 isn't expected by default until at least Fedora 41 in late 2024.

Red Hat engineers are looking at making it more evident on Fedora IoT, CoreOS, and Server editions when firmware updates become available for the hardware in use.

In addition to Fedora 39 aiming to use the Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Workstation, shipping the latest and greatest open-source compiler toolchain components, enhance Linux gaming compatibility, eliminate Flathub filtering, and dozens of other improvements, there are also plans for a more mundane change: a colored bash prompt.

If there wasn't enough Red Hat drama happening in recent weeks, the Red Hat Display Systems Team is now considering to implement privacy-preserving telemetry beginning with Fedora Workstation 40.

For the past year and a half Red Hat engineers have been developing a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer and with the Fedora Workstation 39 release later this year they are looking at possibly switching to it by default.

The Fedora Sericea and Sway spins are eyeing the possibility of shipping without the xorg-x11 packages for being the first X.Org-less desktop spins in the Fedora Linux world.

A change proposal that hopes to take place for Fedora 39 would make it easier to have an optionally GRUB-free system by instead performing a clean install with systemd-boot for booting on EFI platforms.

There's been a proposal in the works for Fedora 39 to raise its default vm.max_map_count in order to satisfy some Windows games running on Linux via Valve's Steam Play. A revised proposal has now been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

There's been a proposal for Fedora Linux to become a new Fedora immutable variant and now it's been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) to happen for the Fedora 39 cycle.

Last year Fedora and Red Hat developers began discussing the idea of dropping legacy BIOS support and to then only focus on UEFI platforms. There was a plan to deprecate BIOS support in Fedora 37 but ultimately it didn't go through due to some cloud providers still booting VMs in BIOS mode and some systems having broken UEFI implementations. An idea has now been raised over the possibility of using U-Boot on x86 BIOS systems to provide a UEFI-like experience from the Fedora perspective.

There's been a Fedora 39 proposal under evaluation for boosting the kernel's vm.max_map_count to help with some Windows games on Steam Play. Though concerns were raised that bumping this kernel tunable too high may not be wise. As such, further testing is to happen for tuning Fedora's stock vm.max_map_count value.

One of the recent change proposals for the in-development Fedora 39 is to ship systemd's mkosi-initrd as a modern and superior alternative to Dracut for constructing initrds.

While there is already Fedora Silverblue as a Fedora Workstation variant leveraging RPM-OSTree for creating an ummutable OS image and Fedora Kinoite as a KDE-based alternative, Fedora Onyx has been proposed as a new immutable variant of Fedora Linux.

The latest feature planning around Fedora 39 for releasing later this year is around ensuring your EFI System Partition (ESP) is large enough for new functionality moving forward.

Fedora 39 this autumn is looking at boosting its vm.max_map_count default to better match the behavior of SteamOS / Steam Deck and allowing more Windows games to run out-of-the-box with Steam Play.

Fedora 38 has been released today after meeting its early release target.

The much anticipated Fedora 38 is cleared for releasing on Tuesday. There are no delays with the Fedora 38 cycle and in fact hitting their "early target date" for shipping on 18 April.

Fedora Workstation developers and those involved at Red Hat have been working to improve the state of disk encryption on Fedora with a end-goal of possibly making the installer encrypt systems by default.

With the Fedora 39 release later this year the developers are planning on moving to RPM 4.19 as the newest version of their packaging format.

I've been playing around with the current development state of Fedora 38 the past few days on several test boxes. While only reaching Fedora 38 Beta this week, it already feels quite polished and stable. To sum it up quite simply, Fedora Workstation 38 is looking like it will be another fantastic release and continuing the modern Fedora Project trend of putting out a bleeding-edge Linux distribution yet production-ready and with far less blemishes compared to releases from years ago.

The beta of Fedora 38 is out and on-time this morning for those wanting to test this latest major update to Fedora Linux.

With the Fedora Linux change completion deadline passed, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has been eyeing up their approved list to see what didn't make the cut for Fedora 38 that is due out in April.

For many years now there has been delta RPM support built into Fedora to allow just downloading the binary difference between the currently installed RPM package and the updated version. While this made sense during the days of limited Internet connectivity/bandwidth, delta RPMs haven't proven useful in years and now Fedora Linux is considering removing this support.

Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (TBB) has been around for many years while with the recent shift to the oneAPI umbrella as oneTBB, in an effort to improve the usability and simplicity of the API they made a number of changes to its interfaces as well as having removed some previously common interfaces. This has led Fedora Linux to running on an older TBB version the past few years while for Fedora 39 later this year they are planning to modernize their Threaded Building Blocks packaging.

The Fedora Project has been working on drafting its strategic plan to help shape the Linux distribution over the next five years. A draft of the plan written up by the Fedora Council has been published and is currently seeking community feedback on their road-map planning.

In addition to the in-development Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda web UI based installer that has been in the works, Fedora IoT is rolling out a new installer of its own to ease deployments around edge computing and Internet of Things devices.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee recently signed off on the proposed "Unfiltered Flathub" feature that makes it easier to enjoy the full collection of software offered by Flatpak's Flathub service.

Last week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on Fedora 38 shipping with its planned bleeding-edge compiler toolchain, most notably including the upcoming GCC 13 compiler.

Last month a change proposal was filed for aiming to yield faster reboots and shutdowns of Fedora Linux by shortening the time window that services can block the shutdown process. A modified version of that change proposal has now been cleared by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

At today's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) more features were approved for the Fedora 38 release coming up in April.

In addition to Fedora 38 now allowing "no-omit-frame-pointer" to enhance profiling/debugging with possible performance costs, this next Fedora Linux release is also planning to use "_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3" compiler defenses to further bolster security.

The past several months saw much discussion over a proposal to add "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" as a default compiler flag to Fedora Linux that would improve profiling/debugging but with possible performance implications that can vary based on the application/workload. While just over one month ago FESCo rejected that change, they re-voted today and decided after all to allow this change to happen but to ensure that packages can easily opt-out if they find performance regressions. By Fedora 40 they will also re-visit the matter to determine if the benefits and performance costs are justified.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of several more changes / new features planned for Fedora 38.

Fedora has a tradition of always shipping with the very latest open-source compiler toolchain components and central to that is always having the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At times this up-to-date toolchain quest has meant shipping a release candidate / near-final GCC build when it comes to their Q2 release of the year that often lands right around the same time as the annual GCC feature release. Fedora 38 will be another release to again aim for the very latest GNU compiler toolchain components.

A change proposal to be evaluated still by FESCo would help ensure that system shutdowns and reboots can happen faster on Fedora Linux.

Fedora is looking at disallowing X.Org/XWayland clients of difference CPU endianness from connecting to the X.Org Server. Such a combination of different endianness between the X.Org Server and clients is rather rare these days but is yet another "large attack surface" of the X.Org Server that needs addressing.

Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place.

Freed-ora had been a seldom talked about effort from the Free Software Foundation Latin America maintainers of GNU Linux-libre to ensure a fully free software kernel was installed on interested Fedora Linux systems and that no non-free packages were installed on the system. But now that effort has come to an end.