Fedora Had A Super Year From Lenovo Preloads To Btrfs To Many Other New Features

The Fedora project had a pretty terrific and exciting year especially with everything happening in the world this year. Fedora began appearing on more Lenovo device pre-loads, many features landed like Btrfs by default in Fedora Workstation, they continue to be leading the Wayland charge, and a lot of great engineering work by the folks from Red Hat.

Fedora's releases have even trended quite reliably on schedule this year without any massive delays that we have seen in the past. Heck, it's difficult to think of any Fedora pain points this year but just a lot of exciting technical advancements being made while the releases have still been of quality and not too buggy like some of the distant past releases.

It will be very interesting to see where Fedora goes in 2021 but for now here is a look back at the most popular Fedora stories on Phoronix this past year:

Fedora 32 Greenlit For Enabling FSTRIM Support By Default
Back in December was the proposal to finally enable FSTRIM by default for Fedora 32 in benefiting solid-state storage. Today the formal approval was given by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee to go ahead with this long overdue change.

RHEL9 Likely To Drop Older x86_64 CPUs, Fedora Can Better Prepare With "Enterprise Linux Next"
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will likely see support for older x86_64 CPUs eliminated to focus on more modern x86_64 Intel/AMD families. With that, Red Hat developers working on Fedora have been working on an "Enterprise Linux Next" proposal to not only vet such x86_64 build changes but also to provide a feedback workflow for other changes.

Fedora 32 Goes Through Its Formalities To Land GCC 10 + Golang 1.14
Fedora Linux has long been well known for always shipping with bleeding-edge GCC compiler releases even if it means a near-final pre-release, thanks in part to Red Hat's significant engineering resources to GCC and the GNU toolchain in general. With Fedora 32 it's expected to be no different with having the upcoming GCC 10 compiler.

Fedora Approves Of Making Nano The Default Terminal Text Editor, Other Features Accepted
At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall.

Fedora 32 Delayed From Releasing Next Week Due To Bugs
Hopefully it won't be like many Fedora releases in the past that were dragged out for weeks at a time due to blocker bugs (thankfully, recent Fedora releases have been tremendously better in that regard), but Fedora 32 will not be debuting next week as planned due to bugs.

Fedora CoreOS Now Deemed Production Ready For Containerized Workload Experience
Fedora CoreOS has graduated out of its preview state and is now considered ready for general use.

GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Performance + Power Usage On Fedora 32 With AMD Renoir Laptop
As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32.

Fedora 32 Looking At Using EarlyOOM By Default To Better Deal With Low Memory Situations
For months there has been many different discussions over the Linux desktop's poor performance when under memory pressure / out-of-memory type situations. That has resulted in some upstream work so far like GNOME GLib's GMemoryMonitor as well as discussions by distribution vendors about what solutions they could enable today to help the low memory situations. Fedora 32 could begin shipping and using EarlyOOM by default to help in this area.

Python Can Run Up To ~27% Faster On Fedora 32 With Optimization
Python scripts may be running noticeably faster come the release of Fedora 32 in April.

Fedora's Scientific & Audio/Music Spins Could Be On Their Last Leg
Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up.

Fedora Project Leader Envisions The Project Becoming An "Operating System Factory"
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has shared his vision for Fedora over the next decade and is encouraging discussions about the direction of this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution over the next five to ten years.

Fedora Developers Discuss Retiring NTP, Deprecating SCP Protocol
Following the successful shipping of Fedora 33, Red Hat developers have begun proposing more changes for future Fedora releases.

Fedora Adopts A New Vision Statement
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has sent out a reminder to Fedora contributors to "be excellent to each other" while announcing the project has a new vision statement.

Fedora's FESCo Has Deferred Any Decision On EarlyOOM By Default
One of the changes planned for Fedora 32 has been to enable EarlyOOM by default to better handle low memory situations either due to the system running with minimal RAM or under memory pressure. But the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has yet to reach a decision over this default.

Fedora Developers Restart Talk Over Using Nano As The Default Text Editor
Fedora developers are once again discussing a proposal on switching to Nano as the default text editor on Fedora systems.

Lenovo Starts Offering Up Fedora Linux Pre-Loaded Systems From Their Web Store
As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora.

Fedora 32 Beta To Be Released Next Week
Fedora 32 Beta was deemed unready for release on Thursday during the initial Go/No-Go meeting but after reconvening twenty-four hours later the remaining blocker bugs were addressed.

Fedora 33's "Enterprise Linux Next" Effort Approved - Testbed For Raising CPU Requirements, Etc
Fedora 33 later this year will see a new "Enterprise Linux Next" (ELN) buildroot and compose setup for testing new changes potentially destined for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Most notable from the original ELN proposal is on potentially raising the x86_64 CPU requirements. ELN is now approved to take place.

Fedora 33 Planning To Enable Systemd-Resolved By Default
Fedora 33 this autumn is looking to make use of systemd-resolved by default rather than NSS-DNS for name resolution.

Lenovo To Begin Shipping ThinkPad Laptops With Fedora Pre-Installed
When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops.