Fedora News Archives

The work led by Red Hat's Hans de Goede the past few Fedora release cycles has culminated with a great out-of-the-box boot experience for the upcoming Fedora 30.

It soon might be easier should you find yourself trying to build Debian packages from a Fedora system.

The plan to use the Wayland-native version of Firefox by default for Fedora Workstation 30 atop GNOME has been tentatively approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).

Under a late change proposal for Fedora 30, the DNF package manager's "best" mode might be enabled by default.

While Fedora 30 isn't debuting for another three months, with the system-wide change deadline already having passed on that release, ambitious Fedora developers are already thinking about early feature plans for Fedora 31 that will debut in November.

While Fedora 31 was once talked about to never happen or be significantly delayed to focus on re-tooling the Linux distribution, they opted for a sane approach not to throw off the release cadence while working on low-level changes around the platform. A draft of the release schedule for Fedora 31 has now been published and it puts the release date at the end of November.

Fedora's Engineering and Steering Committee approved new work around the in-development Fedora 30.

Monday's weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee approved of a means for the DNF package manager to integrate some user counting capabilities as long as it's a "sane" approach and not the UUID-driven proposal originally laid out.

While Intel is finally poised to enable Fastboot by default for recent generations of their Iris/HD/UHD Graphics hardware, which could happen as soon as Linux 5.1, for now Fedora is comfortable enough enabling the support by default on their own.

Earlier this month there was a change proposal announced that would give Fedora system's a new unique UUID tracking identifier to count systems. The intention isn't to track users but rather to provide more statistics about the Fedora install base compared to the current system that is just tracking unique IP addresses, but a revised proposal would improve the privacy while still offering up much of the same statistics potential.

Yum was supposed to be removed from Fedora 29 in favor of the modern DNF package manager that is largely compatible with Yum commands of the past. But its retirement was delayed due to the request being late in the cycle and some infrastructure like Koji and Pungi having not finished the migration to DNF interfaces. Yum's retirement might come for Fedora 30 but it could be too late.

For the past two and a half years there has been a non-default Firefox package with Wayland support available to Fedora users running Fedora Workstation with the GNOME Shell. For the Fedora 30 release due out this spring, they are planning to ship the Firefox Wayland back-end by default.

With each new Fedora release you can pretty much be guaranteed it will be using the latest and greatest releases of the GNOME desktop, the most recent stable kernel, and it's also been very punctual in switching over to new major releases of the GCC compiler -- generally being the first of the major Linux distributions adopting the annual major GNU compiler releases. With Fedora 30 due out in May, it should ship with GCC 9.1 as would be standard practice. It's not guaranteed though as FESCo hasn't signed off on it with this change request coming in past the deadline.

Adding to the growing Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) ecosystem alongside Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, and others is now Fedora Remix. But this spin of Fedora catered for WSL isn't free and not officially sanctioned or supported by Red Hat nor the Fedora project.

Earlier this month was word that Fedora developers were looking at packaging Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) to make it easier for their distribution users to enjoy this open-source Radeon GPU computing software from OpenCL to a TensorFlow port. Some of the early packages of ROCm are now under review for Fedora.

Fedora has been working on transitioning to Zchunk for its DNF metadata due to its good compression ratio while being delta-friendly and leveraging the existing work of Zstandard and Zsync/casync. The metadata has been offered in Zchunk for some weeks while more client testing is needed before landing that support in Rawhide and in turn for Fedora 30.

Back in October, MongoDB announced the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPLv1) as their new license moving forward for this document-oriented database server over their existing AGPL code. SSPL was met with much controversy upon its unveiling and Fedora's legal team has now ruled it an invalid free software license for packaged software in its repositories.

Last month we mentioned that Fedora 30 was possibly picking up a Deepin Desktop Environment option for this Qt5-based desktop developed by the Deepin Linux distribution.

Longtime Red Hat / Fedora designer Máirín Duffy has shared some proposals for a new Fedora logo and the lengths they are going to in coming up with this new logo/marks.

Last month Fedora developers were planning on building their Firefox package with Clang rather than GCC to follow the move by upstream Mozilla in transitioning their production builds from being built under GCC to LLVM Clang. But now Fedora has reversed course and will continue building with GCC though now benefiting also from PGO and LTO optimizations.

New Fedora releases go hand-in-hand with the latest and greatest GNOME releases. But as a formality, the change proposal has been submitted to officially approve shipping Fedora Workstation 30 with the GNOME 3.32 desktop.

Fedora developers are looking at implementing a per-system UUID identifier leveraged by the DNF package manager in order to more accurately count their user-base.

Since November the developers behind Fedora Linux had been discussing whether to significantly delay or even cancel Fedora 31 so they could spend around one year working on re-tooling how the distribution is crafted and work on other fundamental changes. But it turns out now they have decided against this big shake-up delay.

Fedora 29 wanted to have the use of LUKS2 by default when going for full-disk encryption compared to the LUKS1 meta-data format, but that didn't turn out in time so now the hope is to have it ready for Fedora 30.

The latest change/feature proposal is to ship Fedora 30 with Go 1.12.

Fedora 29 aimed to provide UEFI support for ARMv7 given the maturing support to U-Boot and other components, but that didn't turn out as planned so is now being worked on for Fedora 30.

Fedora 29 succeeded at a long elusive and rather mystical flicker-free boot experience that has continued to improve since release. With Fedora 30, that flicker-free boot experience should be in even better standing.

After being an opt-in feature since Fedora 28, this year's Fedora 30 release will enable Python generators by default to help in crafting packages around Python code.

It was a very exciting year for Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution process with the successful releases of Fedora 28 and 29, each of those new Fedora releases adding in plenty of new features, achieving the long-desired flicker-free polished boot experience, and Fedora Silverblue taking shape for what was formerly their Atomic Workstation initiative. Next year though could be even more radical for the project.

Zchunk is the file format announced earlier this year for delivering good compression while being delta-friendly and based upon Zsync and Casync while compression handling is done by Zstandard.

The latest Linux desktop environment sought for inclusion in the Fedora package repository is for the Deepin Desktop Environment.

Fedora's Silverblue initiative formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation currently doesn't work with the NVIDIA binary driver, but that soon could change.

Fedora developers are working on trying to figure out the best default behavior moving forward for their I/O scheduler selection.

Following the move by upstream Mozilla in switching their Linux builds of Firefox from being compiled by GCC to LLVM Clang, Fedora is planning the same transition of compilers in the name of compilation speed and resulting performance.

While many Linux distributions have moved past GnuPG 1 and some no longer even packaging it, Fedora Linux continues using GnuPG 1 as the default gpg, but that is likely to change with Fedora 30.

Following the plan to cancel or significantly delay Fedora 31 to work on extensive tooling of the Linux distribution, there is a separate proposal that was volleyed suggesting Fedora move to an annual release cadence.

Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.

The recent release of Fedora 29 the long-desired goal of a flicker-free boot experience to the Linux desktop was finally achieved... Well, assuming you are for now using Intel graphics and set a couple extra settings and don't have any quirky hardware. While all of the key components are in place, for Fedora 30 and beyond they will likely be taking care of the "rough edges" and already there is work on a new Plymouth boot theme for pairing with this flicker-free boot process.

Fedora has finally enabled ClearType sub-pixel rendering in FreeType for providing much nicer font rendering.

Fedora 29 is now available as the newest version of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution. Fedora 29 has a lot of work on its Workstation/desktop spin, the Fedora Silverblue release has come together nicely for an atomic OS, Fedora Server continues to serve as a great basis for likely what RHEL8 will be looking like, and there are various other enhancements throughout the Fedora stack.

While Fedora 29 is cleared for release tomorrow, 30 October, the LXQt and Xfce spins may be delayed a bit.

After it was delayed last week, the beautiful Fedora 29 will greet the world next week.

Just ahead of the Fedora 29 release where Fedora Silverblue has become quite usable for a Flatpak-focused, atomic experience built using OSTree, Fedora developers have unveiled Fedora Toolbox.

Fedora 29 will not be managing to deliver its final release right on time due to lingering blocker bugs.

In addition to Ubuntu 18.10 releasing soon, Fedora 29 is set to be release by month's end if all goes well.

Red Hat / Fedora developers have updated Firefox packages pending for F27 / F28 / F29 that bring a slew of improvements for the web-browser operating under Wayland.

As of last night Fedora 29 embarked upon its final freeze as the last step for reaching its official debut by month's end.

After optimizing the Linux laptop battery life last cycle, Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been working on Fedora 29 to provide a "flicker-free" boot experience. A Linux desktop flicker-free boot has been talked about for a decade or longer but with Fedora 29 and using Intel graphics that is finally becoming a reality.

The Fedora project has officially announced the beta release this morning of Fedora 29.

With Fedora 29 Beta set to ship today, here's a reminder about some of the great changes on the way with this next installment of the Fedora Linux distribution that is on track to officially release around the end of October.