Red Hat's Upstream Contributions Are Making For A Great Fedora Workstation 35

Fedora Workstation 35 will hopefully be out at the end of October (currently the beta is running behind schedule) and when it does ship it's once again at the bleeding-edge of Linux features. Fedora Workstation 35 is shaping up to be another great release for those interested in a feature-rich desktop experience.

Fedora Workstation 35 test builds have been working out great on the few systems I've tried so far in the lab. More Fedora Workstation 35 testing and benchmarks will be coming up in the weeks ahead. In anticipation of the upcoming Fedora 35 Beta, Red Hat's Christian Schaller once again published a new blog post outlining some of the big changes on the Fedora Workstation side for this six-month update.

Thanks to Red Hat's upstream focus, many of these changes are now living in the respective upstream repositories around the Linux kernel, GNOME, and other affected components. Here is a look at some of the Fedora Workstation 35 highlights:

- Much improved support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack with Wayland. Red Hat continues to cooperate with NVIDIA to ensure better (X)Wayland support.

- Outside of the NVIDIA driver support, there also continues to be a variety of other Wayland improvements with GNOME and Fedora Workstation 35 itself.

- High resolution mouse wheel support, which we've covered a few times in recent weeks thanks to that upstream libinput work.

- PipeWire continues to mature very nicely for handling audio and video streams on Linux and successfully replace JACK and PulseAudio. PipeWire so far has been a resounding success and continues improving with each new release.

- Driven by RHEL needs, GNOME now has a "kiosk mode" intended for information boards, cash registers, ATMs, and other similar use-cases. This is a lightweight mode now also available with Fedora Workstation 35.

- Privacy screen support going along with the upstream kernel features for enabling this support found on newer laptops.

- Integrating power profiles (ACPI platform profiles) support within the GNOME desktop.

- Red Hat / Fedora continues monitoring the progress of Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan for when they may be able to focus on just shipping Vulkan drivers. Red Hat's Adam Jackson has been working on Penny as part of this effort.

- Improving handling of third-party software within Fedora and cleaning up various aspects of it.

Stop by Christian's blog for a full look at the Fedora Workstation 35 highlights.