Fedora News Archives

Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature.

A change proposal was raised this week for upgrading Fedora's LXQt desktop offering to the recently released LXQt 2.0 for the upcoming Fedora 41 release.

The Fedora change proposal was approved this week by their engineering and steering committee to support AMD SEV-SNP virtualization host support to allow easily launching confidential computing virtual machines (VMs) with Fedora 41.

The ROCm 6.1 series is the latest stable version currently of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack with an increasing large focus on AI. AMD has confirmed to Red Hat that ROCm 6.2 will debut before the release of Fedora 41, so the developers are now hoping to be shipping ROCm 6.2 packages with this upcoming Fedora Linux release.

Installing the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver stack on Fedora currently doesn't jive with UEFI Secure Boot systems and can lead to the OS being unbootable. As such, the NVIDIA driver option was previously removed from GNOME Software. But as the NVIDIA driver is still widely sought after on Fedora by Linux gamers and those wanting to run CUDA/AI workloads especially, Fedora 41 is now cleared to roll-out NVIDIA driver support with UEFI Secure Boot integration.

Coming in as a rather late change proposal for Fedora 41 is to support self-encrypting drives from within the OS installer.

While Fedora 41 isn't even out yet, early feature planning is already underway for Fedora 42 that will debut in the early months of 2025. One of the interesting proposals raised so far is for making use of the new DRM Panic screen functionality for a "Blue Screen of Death" of sorts for better presenting kernel error messages in case of kernel panics.

Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed.

In addition to proposed opt-in data metrics collection and the new web-based installer UI, some of the other early proposals for Fedora Linux 42 that isn't due out until April of 2025 is expanding the possibilities for unprivileged users.

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

Data collection around users tends to be a very touchy subject in the Linux/open-source world even when opt-in and Fedora Workstation 42 has just seen a proposal raised to do just that. If approved the Fedora Workstation 42 release would roll-out an opt-in metrics system of anonymous user information from system settings to hardware information and desktop usage patterns.

A change proposal has been approved for Fedora 41 to make OpenSSL distrust SHA1 signatures by default.

With Fedora's new web-based installer UI being delayed to 2025 with Fedora 42, part of Red Hat's justification for that setback was needing to invest resources first in Fedora 41 by transitioning the OS installer to being a native Wayland application. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now signed off on that work as expected to make the Anaconda OS installer a native Wayland application.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins.

Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41.

Christian Schaller of Red Hat shared an update on Friday around the ongoing enhancements to Fedora Workstation. Given the current industry trends, ongoing Fedora Workstation development is seeing a lot of attention around... AI, AI, AI.

Back in April I noted that Fedora was considering replacing Redis with Valkey given the upstream Redis software licensing changes. At yesterday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) they have now signed off on replacing Redis with Valkey.

It's been more than two years now talking about the Anaconda installer for Fedora/RHEL shifting to a web-based UI. Going back to Fedora 37 have been previews and plans for getting this modern user interface up to parity but it's been a long road. With repeated delays, there's at least one more delay: the Anaconda web UI was just shifted from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42.

A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved of the newest Fedora desktop ISO spin: Fedora Miracle.

Building off the recent release of Fedora 40, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 is now available for this downstream of Fedora Linux that's optimized to run on Apple Silicon ARM systems.

In addition to approving -O3 optimized Python builds, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESC)) this week unanimously approved a Fedora 41 change proposal for making RPM package builds more reproducible.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the plans for Fedora 41 to build its Python using the "-O3" compiler optimization level rather than the "-O2" default for Fedora packages in the name of better performance.

Given the upstream Redis software licensing changes, Fedora is evaluating replacing Redis with the new Valkey project.

Not to be confused with Fedora's "Beefy Miracle" from a decade ago during their entertaining codename days, but a Fedora Miracle spin has been proposed for the now-open Fedora 41 development cycle.

It's Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution.

After not being ready in time for this week's early release target date, it's now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved RPM 4.20 to land for the Fedora 41 cycle that will debut in H2'2024. RPM 4.20 is a significant update for this widely-used packaging format.

Continuing a trend worked on in recent Fedora Linux releases and more broadly in the open-source ecosystem at large for securing the software supply chain and ensuring unaltered binaries, Fedora 41 is aiming to ensure more reproducible package builds.

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.

Following the plans going back to 2022 for Fedora 39 to use DNF5 but last summer deemed weren't ready and then delayed DNF5 to Fedora 41 due to the RHEL10 branching from Fedora 40, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now given their sign-off for the updated package manager in F41.

A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat's deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.

Fedora 39 had hoped to use the DNF5 package manager by default as the next iteration of this package management solution for RPM-based distributions. But DNF5 wasn't ready and then delayed to Fedora 41 -- skipping over the Fedora 40 series due to the RHEL 10 branching from it and not wanting the very new DNF5 to be part of that merge. Now the change proposal has been re-filed for introducing DNF5 by default in Fedora 41.

The beta release of Fedora 40 is now available for testing ahead of the planned official release next month.

After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week.

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.

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.