Many New Features Approved This Week For Fedora 40

This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April.

The Fedora 40 features / change proposals now formally approved by FESCo this week include:

- Continuing to improve support for unified kernel images (UKIs) within Fedora. This latest phase will focus on support for booting UKIs directly, enabling UKIs on AArch64, and odding a UEFI-only cloud image variant based on UKIs.

- An update policy exception for EFF's Certbot as the Python package to manage free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt and others. This policy for allowing Certbot to more easily update post-release is primarily for benefiting Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL).

- Enabling IPv4 address conflict detection by default.

- Updating to the LLVM 18 compiler stack.

- Updating to Golang 1.22.

- Updating to Haskell GHC 9.6 and Stackage LTS 22.

- Renaming/changing the Mozilla Firefox .desktop file so that it complies with DBus/GNOME search provider rules.

- Unifying /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.

- Fedora will now assign individual, stable MAC addresses for WiFi connections to better the security / privacy.

- Updating to Kubernetes 1.29.

- Removing the deprecated Python Mock usage.

- The third phase of transitioning from Fedora short names for licenses over to SPDX identifiers.

- SELinux policy entries are to move from /var/run to /run.

- Fedora Cloud Edition images will now be built using Kiwi in Koji.

More details on these latest changes approved for Fedora 40 via the FESCo meeting minutes.