Fedora 37 Will Not Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

Following weeks of vibrant public discussions over the change proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support in Fedora 37, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has rejected the change and will keep around the BIOS booting support for now.

Fedora potentially dropping legacy BIOS support to focus on more modern UEFI machines led to one of the most active Fedora feature discussions in recent times. There's also been talk of possibly offloading legacy BIOS responsibilities to a SIG and other changes. But long story short, it was made clear to FESCo members that it's too soon for Fedora to drop legacy BIOS booting support.

FESCO has now formally rejected the change to deprecate legacy BIOS support for Fedora 37 later this year. So those steering clear of UEFI support either due to running on vintage hardware or just preferring the support be disabled on newer hardware, you can still happily use Fedora 37 this autumn.

While legacy BIOS deprecation was rejected, FESCo did approve other Fedora 37 changes of upgrading to RPM 4.18, legacy X.Org driver removal, Haskell GHC 9.0 / Stackage LTS 19, upgrading of Microdnf, and replacing jwhois with whois for Fedora Workstation.

More details on this week's FESCo discussions via this mailing list post.