Fedora News Archives

With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway.

It's crazy to think it has already been ten years since Arm disclosed ARMv8 with 64-bit support. Given the success of ARMv8 (and Armv9 now on the way) and there not being much in the way of useful ARMv7 hardware in recent years and the like, Fedora has drafted plans for retiring its ARMv7 support.

Fedora 35 is now officially available today as the latest major release of this Linux distribution developed by Red Hat and the open-source community. Fedora 35 is another very rich feature update at the forefront of Linux innovations from servers to the desktop.

After dealing with blocker bugs the past two weeks, Fedora 35 is now confirmed for releasing next week.

Red Hat's Platform Tools team is making it very easy to run the very bleeding edge, development version of the LLVM toolchain and Clang compiler on the current versions of Fedora.

After seeing some initial release challenges, Fedora 35 Beta was released today across the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora IoT flavors as well as their other versions.

While many years ago Fedora's Java support was in great shape with quickly integrating OpenJDK going back to IcedTea, these days Fedora's Java packages are barely maintained and largely fallen into disrepair.

Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features. Fedora Workstation 35 is shaping up to be another great release for those interested in a feature-rich desktop experience.

While getting late in the cycle, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved some additional changes for Fedora 35 due out this fall.

While Fedora currently allows restarting of system services automatically when upgrading the packages for those services, there hasn't been that capability for user services to automatically restart as part of RPM package upgrades. But now approved for Fedora 35 is that change.

Fedora Workstation 35 is looking to ship with power-profiles-daemon by default and to have it enabled for benefiting newer laptops.

While Fedora 34 successfully shipped with PipeWire for managing audio/video streams and replacing PulseAudio use-cases, with Fedora 35 this autumn the integration around PipeWire should be even better.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has unanimously approved a large number of new Fedora 35 features this week.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said "yes" to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution's next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts.

With this autumn's Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is dropping support for older x86_64 CPUs by raising the baseline requirement to "x86_64-v2" that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem era processors and newer, so far Fedora has not changed its default. There was a proposal shot down last year for raising the x86_64 microarchitecture feature level while now that discussion has been restarted or alternatively making use of Glibc's HWCAPS facility for allowing run-time detection and loading of optimized libraries.

Adding to the list of planned improvements for Fedora 35 is switching to make use of Yescrypt for hashing of user passwords.

Fedora Workstation has been defaulting to the Btrfs file-system since F33 while other editions of Fedora Linux have continued using their defaults. With Fedora Cloud 35, this cloud spin of Fedora is now also looking to migrate to Btrfs.

Fedora 35 is looking to replace the unmaintained SDL 1.2 packages with using the sdl12-compat compatibility layer for better handling of vintage Linux games by this upcoming distribution release.

A Fedora 35 change proposal submitted this week that is ruffling some feathers is over removing the "allow SSH root login with password" option from Fedora's Anaconda installer.

It's Fedora 34 day! Fedora 34 is now officially available and it's quite exciting on the feature front especially with the changes to be enjoyed in Fedora Workstation 34.

After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.

Right now Fedora Linux predominantly uses GCC as the default system compiler except for cases where the upstream project only supports LLVM/Clang. But moving forward packagers working on Fedora could decide to switch to using LLVM Clang for building a given package where it is worthwhile.

The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

Red Hat engineers spearheaded the work on Debuginfod for being able to fetch debuginfo/sources from centralized servers for a project to cut-down on manually having to install the relevant debug packages manually on a system as well as that occupying extra disk space and just being a hassle. The Fedora project is now getting their Debuginfod server off the ground and for Fedora Linux 35 are planning to make use of it by default.

While Fedora 34 isn't releasing until the end of April or so, there is already feature planning that has continued for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn.

Fedora 34 Beta is out today as the march is on towards this latest installment of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

Fedora 34 due out in April is shaping up to be a very exciting feature release as usual with this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution continuing to live on the bleeding-edge of the open-source software ecosystem. Fedora Workstation 34 in particular is heavy on updates and new features, led by the GNOME 40 desktop.

While Fedora 34 will be out around the end of next month, there are already change proposals being filed for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn. One of those early changes for that next release cycle is referring to the OS as "Fedora Linux" within its OS release information.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved plans for "Fedora Kinoite" as the newest spin to debut this autumn alongside Fedora 35.

Among Facebook employees while they are mostly using Windows and macOS on their laptops/desktops, for those using Linux the primary choice has shifted from Ubuntu to Fedora but they have begun ramping up CentOS Stream too.

Over the past year there has been much chatter about Enterprise Linux Next within the Fedora camp and now this special interest group (SIG) is finally getting underway.

The plan for Fedora 34 to improve font rendering by enabling HarfBuzz in FreeType was approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has unanimously approved several high profile features for the upcoming Fedora 34.

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library.

While the i3 window manager has been around for more than a decade, it's taken until now for an i3 window manager spin of Fedora to be solicited and approved.

In addition to pursuing many technical changes for its Linux distribution like systemd-oomd by default, Btrfs Zstd compression, and standalone XWayland releases, the Fedora project is also looking to overhaul its community outreach this year.

Adding to the changes abound at CentOS beyond CentOS 8 going EOL at year's end to focus instead on CentOS Stream feeding into the future RHEL, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are now proposing a Hyperscale special interest group for this RHEL-based platform.

Last year with Fedora 33 zRAM was switched on by default. The setup was that using a compressed zRAM drive for swap space leads to better performance and in turn a better user experience. Some spins of Fedora have been using swap-on-zRAM by default going back many releases while since F33 it's been used for all spins. Now with Fedora 34 the configuration is being further refined.

The release of Fedora 34 this spring is now cleared to enable systemd-oomd by default for all spins in an effort to enhance the out-of-memory / memory pressure experience on Linux.

Yet another big change being eyed for Fedora 34 is to sign individual files within shipped RPM packages. The signatures will use the Linux Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and in turn can be used to enforce run-time policies around only allowing the execution of trusted files.

Fedora 34 remains under active feature development and another batch of features were unanimously approved of by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

Keeping up with Fedora's tradition of offering the very latest open-source software packages, the straight-forward proposal was made this week to update its lightweight LXQt desktop packages against the new LXQt 0.16.

Fedora is preparing to ship the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel as a stable release update to those on Fedora 32 and newer.

The Fedora project had a pretty terrific and exciting year especially with everything happening in the world this year. Fedora began appearing on more Lenovo device pre-loads, many features landed like Btrfs by default in Fedora Workstation, they continue to be leading the Wayland charge, and a lot of great engineering work by the folks from Red Hat.

While it shouldn't come as much of a surprise given Fedora's tendency to always ship with the freshest open-source packages, but Fedora 34 should be including the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop packages for those seeking that GTK based desktop.

Fedora Workstation 33 successfully switched over from EXT4 to using Btrfs as its default file-system. Now with Fedora 34 due out in the spring we are seeing Fedora beginning to make use of more features offered by Btrfs.

For those looking to get involved with the Fedora project in manner besides the likes of coding and documentation, a Fedora Zine is being established and are looking for creative submissions.

Fedora 34 is shaping up to be another exciting Fedora Linux release on the feature front. Among the material to look forward to in this spring 2021 Linux distribution release is routing all audio through PipeWire by default, enabling systemd-oomd by default, an independent XWayland package, and more. The latest proposal involves making use of DNF/RPM copy-on-write support atop Btrfs with Fedora 34.

At the end of November systemd 247 released with the new Out-of-Memory Daemon (systemd-oomd) and for the Fedora 34 release next year that will likely be enabled by default for all spins.