Fedora 29 Is On Track With A Lot Of Changes

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.

- GNOME 3.30 makes up the default desktop environment and the many improvements to the GNOME Shell / Mutter and all the contained components.

- Fedora Workstation 29 continues using Wayland by default but X.Org Server 1.20 is packaged for the latest XWayland support and other newer X/Mesa graphics bits.

- Xfce 4.13 packages have begun appearing if that desktop is more your style.

- Initial Wayland remote desktop bits on GNOME using PipeWire and XDG-Desktop-Portal.

- Fedora Silverblue is here as the replacement to Fedora Atomic Workstation. This modern Linux OS spin is largely in good shape but for Fedora 30 is when they are hoping for Silverblue to be fully ready for primetime.

- TLS 1.3 support.

- Better support for FPGAs.

- Various ARM improvements.

- Support for LUKS2 by default within the Fedora "Anaconda" installer.

- i686 package builds are now catered for x86_64 users.

- Full support for the FreeDesktop.org Boot Loader spec.

- Binutils 2.31, Python 3.7, and other toolchain upgrades.

A complete overview of the accepted changes for Fedora 29 can be found via the Fedora Wiki. This is shaping up to be a great release for going up against the likes of Ubuntu 18.10, macOS Mojave, and Windows 10 October 2018 Update.

If all goes well the rest of the cycle, Fedora 29 will be out before the end of October.