Fedora 34 Cleared For Btrfs Zstd Compression By Default, DNF/RPM Copy-On-Write

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has unanimously approved several high profile features for the upcoming Fedora 34.

The latest batch of Fedora 34 features that received unanimous approval ahead of tomorrow's scheduled FESCo meeting include:

- Deprecating XEMacs and related packages. This is due to XEmacs not seeing a major release in over seven years and the upstream development essentially at an end. There is still an occasional commit but no meaningful additions being made and thus XEMacs is being deprecated.

- The Xfce 4.16 desktop environment is approved for packaging in F34.

- The plan to enable Zstd transparent file-system compression for Btrfs by default has been approved. Thus new Fedora installations with the default Btrfs file-system will enjoy Zstd compression for greater space savings.

- Another Btrfs-based feature now approved for Fedora 34 is the DNF/RPM copy-on-write handling for package installation atop Btrfs in CoW mode. This should provide for faster package installations and upgrades.

Those are the latest approved items by FESCo for Fedora 34 due out at the end of April.