Fedora News Archives

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the proposal for defaulting to PipeWire with Fedora 34 due out next spring.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a fresh batch of changes this week for Fedora 34 that is due out next spring.

With the X.Org Server being "abandonware" but at the same time the upstream XWayland portion of the codebase continuing to be worked on, Fedora developers at Red Hat are looking at splitting XWayland into its own standalone package to make it easier to ship it without having to use the rest of the xorg-server code-base.

Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the recent proposal for introducing a new spin that features the KDE Plasma desktop for 64-bit ARM (AArch64).

Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer.

Fedora stakeholders and the folks at Red Hat have been discussing the idea of having a "lightly maintained" package repository (or some RPM metadata otherwise to indicate such light maintenance) for packages that are either very new, not receiving much packaging attention, or simply used as a build dependency for other packages.

Fedora 33 was just released at the end of October but already a number of change proposals are building up for Fedora 34 due out next spring.

Following the successful shipping of Fedora 33, Red Hat developers have begun proposing more changes for future Fedora releases.

Fedora 33 has just been released as the last major update to this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution for 2020.

Given the AArch64 laptops coming to market and continuing popularity around ARM64 SBCs for Linux desktop use-cases, Fedora's KDE special interest group is proposing Fedora KDE Plasma edition also be spun for the 64-bit ARM architecture.

Fedora 33 will manage to ship on-time per its back-up target date of next week Tuesday.

One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release.

The beta of Fedora 33 is available this morning ahead of the official release expected at the end of October for this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week.

Currently on Fedora the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) functionality that's there by default can be disabled at run-time via the /etc/selinux/config but moving forward with Fedora 34 they are looking at removing that support and focusing just on disabling via selinux=0 at the kernel boot time in order to provide greater security.

The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting.

For four years now since Fedora 25 the default GNOME Shell desktop environment has been using Wayland by default. Next spring with Fedora 34, the KDE Spin is finally planning a similar migration to use Wayland by default with the KDE Plasma desktop.

While Fedora 33 hasn't even been released yet, Fedora 34 is already seeing new feature proposals.

Proposed last year for Fedora 32 was aiming to make it easier to swap out GCC for other alternate compilers (like Clang) by using the update-alternatives functionality on Fedora for handling the /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++ symbolic links. That work was deferred to Fedora 33 as it wasn't completed in time while now it's been deferred yet again to Fedora 34 next year.

For the past few years there has been a Fedora spin for the "Internet of Things" while with Fedora 33 this autumn the Fedora IoT version is being promoted to an official edition.

Fedora's plans to make use of link-time optimizations (LTO) by default with the GCC compiler when building Fedora 33 packages is looking like it will successfully pan out.

Last month was the proposal for Fedora to make DXVK their default back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage with their packaged Wine build rather than WineD3D. That's now been approved for Fedora 33!

Fedora developers continue embracing the work on making the Btrfs file-system the default for F33 desktop variants. Their latest progress report indicates new installation options being wired up for the Btrfs support.

Going back to last year Fedora has been working to enable link-time optimizations by default for their packages. That goal wasn't achieved for Fedora 32 but for Fedora 33 this autumn they still have chances of marking that feature off their TODO list.

Fedora's less talked about "Internet of Things" (IoT) edition is looking to be promoted to an official spin for Fedora 33.

While Fedora 33 is slated to default to the Btrfs file-system for desktop spins, for those on Fedora Server 33 or otherwise not using the defaults will have Stratis Storage 2.1 as another option.

A progress report was shared today on the work towards making the Btrfs file-system the default choice for the desktop spins of the upcoming Fedora 33.

Fedora 33 is already set to be one of their largest releases ever and it's only getting bigger.

Fedora like most distributions ship their Wine packages as-is at the defaults, but for Fedora 33 we could see DXVK used by default on Wine in place of the conventional WineD3D back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage.

In looking beyond the massive Fedora 33 release in development, Fedora developers have begun discussing options for allowing better memory testing on their distribution for evaluating possible faulty RAM issues that otherwise often get mixed in with other software bugs and other sporadic behavior.

While Fedora 33 desktop variants are aiming to use Btrfs by default, non-desktop environments are not and Red Hat remains committed to XFS and their Stratis Storage technology for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Coming to Fedora 33 will also likely be Stratis 2.1 for offering the latest on that front.

Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee formally signed off today on allowing Fedora 33 desktop variants to default to using the Btrfs file-system rather than the existing EXT4 default or other alternatives.

At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall.

The proposal for using Btrfs by default on the Fedora desktop is gaining a fair amount of traction and interest from the community and could possibly move ahead but further testing and decisions are still to be made.

As one of the last minute change proposals for Fedora 33 is to introduce the Red Hat backed Storage Instantiation Daemon "SID" though at least for this first release would be off by default. The Storage Instantiation Daemon is one of the latest storage efforts being worked on by Red Hat engineers.

Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations.

Fedora for the past few releases doesn't show the GRUB boot-loader menu by default when only Fedora is installed on the system as there is little purpose for most users and it just interrupts the boot flow. But for those wanting to access the GRUB bootloader menu on reboot, they offer integration in GNOME to easily reboot into this menu. The other exception is the menu will be shown if the previous boot failed. This functionality has relied on downstream patches but now they are working towards a better upstream solution.

More than a decade ago Fedora was routinely trying to pursue the Btrfs file-system by default but those hopes were abandoned long ago. Heck, Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer even supports Btrfs. While all Red Hat / Fedora interests in Btrfs seemed abandoned years ago especially with Red Hat developing their Stratis storage technology, there is a new (and serious) proposal about moving to Btrfs for Fedora 33 desktop variants.

Fedora developers are once again discussing a proposal on switching to Nano as the default text editor on Fedora systems.

A change proposal for Fedora 33 would introduce the concept of "fedora-retired-packages" for removing retired packages when upgrading Fedora.

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32.

Some Fedora spins have already made use of swap on zRAM for serving as a compressed RAM drive while with Fedora Workstation 33 they are looking to make use of zRAM by default.

A feature proposal raised by Red Hat's Jeff Law would allow Fedora packages to be built under the LLVM Clang compiler rather than defaulting that all packages to be built under GCC. Clang-built packages would happen where the upstream software recommends using Clang by default or for software without an upstream to let the packager(s) make their own decision.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) today approved the plans for Fedora 33 to enable systemd-resolved by default.

Fedora 32 has officially been released as the latest installment of this Red Hat supported community Linux distribution known for its bleeding-edge features and packages.

When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops.

After it was delayed last week, Fedora 32 will now be released next week.

Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs.