Fedora 33 Is Shaping Up To Be One Of Its Biggest Releases Ever

Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever.

Fedora 33 has seen 40 system-wide changes submitted and 18 self-contained changes. For the broad system-wide changes, at 43 it's nearly double that of usual Fedora releases with the likes of F32 seeing only 23 changes or 21 for F31. The second highest release for number of system wide changes was 31 for Fedora 28... Seeing above 40 is rather historic as outlined by this mailing list post via Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek.

As for self-contained changes, it's roughly around twenty per release.

Changes on deck for Fedora 33 can be found via this Wiki page and our ongoing Fedora 33 coverage. Besides the Btrfs file-system default for desktop spins, there are compiler toolchain upgrades and other key packages seeing new versions, 64-bit Arm security improvements, Python 3.9, swap on zRAM usage, making nano the default text editor, systemd-resolved usage, optimizing some package builds, and much more.

Fedora 33 is currently scheduled to be branched in mid-August, a beta release in mid-September, and to aim for a release towards the end of October. Given all the changes expected, hopefully F33 won't be like Fedora releases of the past traditionally known for their drawn out multi-week delays.