New Features Approved For Fedora 40, Renewed Debate Over Dropping KDE X11 Support
Fedora 40 is continuing to look quite exciting with its new features and improvements. A fresh batch of changes were approved this week by FESCo for Fedora 40. The latest approvals include:
- The updated toolchain for Fedora 40 has been approved. This includes GCC 14 as the forthcoming annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. In addition to GCC 14 with its new CPU targets, new C and C++ standards support, and other features, the approved toolchain upgrade also includes GNU Binutils 2.41, Glibc 2.39, and GDB 14.1.
- OpenJDK Java 21 will serve as the default system JDK of Fedora 40. OpenJDK 21 is replacing the former default on Fedora Linux of OpenJDK 17. JDK 8 and JDK 11 will remain available in Fedora.
- The network install images for Fedora Server and Fedora Everything will no longer fit on a CD with the 700MB size... Due in part due to increasing pressure from the size of linux-firmware.git binaries for device firmware, the Fedora network install images can no longer reasonably fit on a CD (700MB). Thus the 700MB size restriction for the Fedora network install images is dropped and allowing higher limits... Then again barely anyone is using CDs in 2024 for installing Linux.
This week's meeting minutes for FESCo can be found on the mailing list.
Separately there is some ongoing conflict over X11 support for KDE with Fedora 40. As part of KDE Plasma 6.0 in Fedora 40, Fedora's KDE X11 support is being dropped. However, outside of the KDE SIG team new review requests were posted for re-introducing kwin-x11 and plasma-workspace-x11 packages. An injunction has been filed with FESCo over the attempt to re-introduce KDE X11 support.
What the KDE SIG team is proposing instead is to still have KDE Plasma X11 support limited to a COPR repository to be maintained on a best-effort option for those not wanting to use KDE Plasma Wayland. FESCo is still to decide on this KDE X11 matter.
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