Fedora 29 Is Shaping Up To Be A Very Exciting Release

While Fedora 28 has been a fantastic release, Fedora 29 that is currently under development for releasing in October is going to be what feels like a massive amount of changes.

Fedora 29 remains under active development and below is a look at many of the changes expected for this next Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release. Keep in mind though not all of the features are complete yet so some could still risk not making it into this next release but could be postponed to Fedora 30 or later.

- GNOME 3.30 with its many Wayland improvements, performance optimizations, and various desktop improvements for making up the default Fedora Workstation desktop environment. GNOME 3.30 on its own right should be an exceptional release.

- Hopefully being ready in time will be the PipeWire-based Wayland remote desktop support.

- Upgrading to the latest Xfce 4.13 packages for those using this lightweight GTK desktop environment alternative to GNOME.

- X.Org Server 1.20 with better XWayland support, enhancements around VR HMD use-cases. better GLAMOR acceleration, and more. X.Org Server 1.20 was released too late for making it into Fedora 28.

- Modules support for everyone and the coming of Fedora Silverblue.

- Possibly dropping GCC from the build root as an infrastructure change.

- Another change still being worked on is eliminating unnecessary linking.

- The Fedora Anaconda installer is looking to support LUKS2 by default.

- Zchunk for DNF repository metadata to yield smaller download sizes.

- GCC 8 will remain the latest stable compiler version though in time for this release should be GCC 8.2 and there will be other toolchain updates like Binutils 2.31.

- Catering i686 package builds to x86_64 users may yield some performance improvements.

- FreeDesktop.org Boot Loader Specification support.

- Defaulting to Dbus-Broker as the default D-Bus.

- Better support for FPGAs.

- Fedora 29 on ARM is working on UEFI for ARMv7 as well as zRAM support.

- MySQL 8.0 should be available on F29 as well as Python 3.7, Ruby on Rails 5.2, and other package updates.

- Discontinuing the PPC64 architecture in favor of the POWER little-endian architecture support.

- TLS 1.3 support via GnuTLS.

- Stronger crypto settings.

- Liberation Fonts 2 are being talked about for finally making it into the distribution after it failed to do so six years ago.

Hopefully these changes and more get squared away in time for Fedora 29. The proposal submission deadline for new features was on Tuesday while the completion deadline for features is coming up on 14 August when the branching of F29 from Rawhide will also take place. The Fedora 29 Beta release is expected around the middle to end of September depending upon delays. Fedora 29 if it doesn't get delayed too much will be out by the end of October.