Fedora 36 Is A Terrific Release Especially For Linux Enthusiasts, Power Users

Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35.

Fedora 36 will be formally released in the coming hours while I just wanted to relay my congratulations and early thoughts on this great release, since today will be a very busy news day. Fedora 36 is a solid release for those wanting a powerful Linux distribution that is modern and forward-looking if you are looking to avoid Ubuntu 22.04 LTS due to its use of Snaps or other reasons, wanting something a bit more dependable than rolling releases like Arch Linux and its derivatives while still shipping current versions of software, or just not satisfied with the other distributions.

Fedora 36 is making use of GNOME 42 for its default Fedora Workstation desktop environment, OpenSSL 3.0, the Linux 5.17 kernel is the current version in use, Mesa 22.0 for open-source graphics drivers, and when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack the Wayland session is now the default over X.Org. Also on the Fedora Workstation front, Google Noto fonts are now used by as the default font set.

For developers, Fedora 36 offers the very brand new GCC 12 compiler stack. There is also Autoconf 2.71, Glibc 2.35, LLVM 14, Ruby 3.1, Ruby on Rails 7.0, PHP 8.1, and other updated packages. OpenJDK 17 provides the updated default Java environment on Fedora 36. There are also other package updates that may interest some like Ansible 5, Django 4.0, LXQt 1.0, PostgreSQL 14, and Stratis 3.0.

Besides shipping with the very latest Linux kernel and Mesa graphics drivers and defaulting to Wayland for the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack, there is also another notable underlying graphics change with this release. Fedora 36 is now using SimpleDRM and the DRM FBDEV emulation code for replacing the conventional FBDEV drivers as another modern step forward.

So far I've tried out Fedora Workstation/Server 36 on around a dozen systems without any issues to note. It's been running solid and look forward to using Fedora 36 on my main production system when I next upgrade my laptop (due to experiences from long ago and old memories, to this day I still don't trust distribution updaters on my main system that it's not worth the hassle, even though Fedora is a far more tamed beast these days).

Fedora 36 will be available for download this morning at GetFedora.org.

Update: Fedora 36 is now officially released!