Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default.
Fedora News Archives
1,187 Fedora open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
For over two years Red Hat's engineers working on the Anaconda installer have been working on a modern web-based installer UI that integrates with Cockpit and is a modern alternative to their GTK-based installer interface for deploying Fedora Linux and eventually RHEL too. The hope was to offer this web UI installer option for Fedora Workstation 40 but that's now been delayed to Fedora 41.
System76 has been developing the Rust-based COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution but its usage won't be artificially limited to that in-house distro. Among other distributions that have been looking toward packaging it, interest is currently being evaluated in creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) for the COSMIC desktop environment.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on Monday approved some last-minute features ahead of the Fedora Linux 40 release quickly coming up in February.
Born out of the success of Fedora Silverblue and the other Fedora immutable variants relying on RPM-OSTree, Fedora has announced Fedora Atomic Desktops as the new branding for these spins.
This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on some new features coming for Fedora 40 this April.
Fedora Linux already ships an iotop-c package for this C alternative to the common iotop program for reporting I/O metrics under Linux, but with the upcoming Fedora 40 release it's looking at having iotop-c replace the original iotop.
Fedora 40 is looking at bpfman for serving as the default eBPF program manager to simplify the deployment and administration of said eBPF programs.
This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April.
While on Fedora and other Linux distributions it can be as easy as running "pip3 install torch" or similar for deploying the PyTorch machine learning framework, Fedora 40 is looking at packaging PyTorch on its own for enhancing the Fedora Linux user experience.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" has signed off on two separate change proposals for further enhancing the system security with the in-development Fedora 40 Linux to be released in April.
In addition to Ubuntu exploring the possibility of x86_64-v3 builds/packages, a proposal has been raised for Fedora Linux with its current Fedora 40 cycle to provide the ability to offer optimized x86_64 (AMD64) binaries based upon the CPU's x86_64 micro-architecture feature level.
Nobara 39 was released today as this modified Fedora Linux downstream that focuses on adding user-friendly fixes and various gamer/enthusiast type desktop optimizations.
One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations.
Among the newly-proposed features for Fedora 40 is enabling WiFi MAC address randomization by default to yield better user privacy.
The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs.
In addition to Fedora 40 applying systemd hardening settings to bolster system security, another security enhancement now approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is on having the linker error out on encountering possible security issues.
Fedora 40 is planning to provide more hardened system security by leveraging some high level security features provided by systemd.
Fedora 40 is eyeing the next phase of its unified kernel (UKI) support within the distribution that will include the ability to support booting to unified kernel image files directly without having to go through a traditional bootloader like GRUB or SD-Boot.
Here are some benchmarks looking at the performance uplift in migrating from Fedora Workstation 38 to Fedora Workstation 39 on an AMD Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series laptop.
A change proposal currently undergoing discussion for Fedora 40 would change their toolchain's (BFD) linker to error out on potential security issues. Currently BFD is emitting warnings on potential security problems but the F40 proposal is to instead error out so the program being built will fail to link when hitting recognized security issues.
While delayed by several weeks compared to their initial release goals, today marks the availability of Fedora 39 as a wonderful upgrade to this popular Linux distribution.
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.
1187 Fedora news articles published on Phoronix.