Fedora 29 Will Cater i686 Package Builds For x86_64, Hide GRUB On Boot

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved on Friday more of the proposed features for this fall's release of Fedora 29, including two of the more controversial proposals.

FESCo made the following approvals yesterday for Fedora 29:

- One of the controversial ones was now catering i686 RPM package builds for running on x86-64 hardware. With those i686 packages mostly being used for multi-lib scenarios and this change allowing these 32-bit x86 packages to now be better optimized like assuming SSE2 support.

- The other approval that generated a lot of discussion on both sides of the table when revealed was hiding of the GRUB boot menu by default except for cases like where having a multi-boot system. Hiding the GRUB boot menu is being done to shorten and clean-up Fedora's boot experience. That too is now happening for Fedora 29.

- Java OpenJDK 11 will be made available in Fedora 29. This is also the next long-term support (LTS) release for the OpenJDK/Java project.

- Node.js 10.x will be the default Node.js interpreter for Fedora 29.

- NSS load p11-kit modules by default was accepted.

- Festival 2.5 as the speech synthesis software is accepted for F29.

- The strengthening of crypto settings that was proposed for Fedora 29 has been deferred until Fedora 30.

The notes and more details on the weekly FESCo meeting can be found via the devel list. Fedora 29 is currently expected for release by the end of October.