Red Hat developers have managed to deliver on their goals around improving Thunderbolt support on the Linux desktop with the upcoming Fedora 28 distribution update.

The upcoming Fedora 28 Linux distribution release is now under its "final freeze" for releasing in the next few weeks.

Today was another weekly Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo). We had been looking forward to this meeting for a decision on the GNOME auto-suspend by default behavior but there wasn't a quorum and that topic was then diverted until next week. But there were also early Fedora 29 features approved this week.

While Ubuntu developers have decided to no longer enable auto-suspend by default as set with the new GNOME 3.28 desktop when running on AC power, Fedora developers are still debating the issue.

The beta of the much anticipated Fedora 28 beta release is now available for testing.

Last week Fedora 28's beta was delayed due to open blocker bugs but fortunately the developers managed to get the issues squared away.

Stemming from the Fedora Server special interest group planning to update their product requirements with a plan to retire the concept of "server roles", Red Hat / Fedora Server SIG is looking for feedback about what you would like to see from Fedora Server.

It's time for the Fedora 28 release dance and to place your bets if F28 will be released on time or is another Fedora release challenged by release delays.

While the Yum-successor DNF package manager most commonly associated with Fedora just had its DNF 2.0 release at the end of 2016, DNF 3.0 is now under development.

Fedora is planning to make a seemingly tardy entrance into the "Internet of Things" space with a new Fedora IoT Edition on the way.

While Red Hat has been divesting from Btrfs and pursuing other Linux storage alternatives like Stratis, it looks like Fedora 28 will feature slightly better support for those opting for Btrfs.

Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of VA-API 1.0 video acceleration for this spring's Fedora 28 release.

Fedora developers are now discussing the possibility of naming a release manager each development cycle as a person in charge of wrangling together each release and seeing that the "Rawhide" development state is kept in better condition. Who knows, this also might actually help Fedora's longtime trouble of delivering releases on time.

Fedora Atomic Workstation is beginning to come together for allowing the core operating system to update atomically as a whole while the desktop applications are expected to be Flatpaks.

Over the past few months Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been focusing on Linux power improvements, in particular to extend the battery life of laptops running Fedora Linux. As indicated by his presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2018, he's making great strides in that effort.

Red Hat developer Hans de Goede has recently been on a mission to improve Linux battery life on Fedora. Now that SATA link power management is better handled and other tweaks, his latest target is on getting Intel's Panel Self Refresh (PSR) support enabled.

The latest work by Fedora developers on feature work for Fedora 28 is shipping with VA-API 1.0 support for updated capabilities around the Video Acceleration API.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved of a number of feature requests for the Fedora 28 release due out in May.

After abandoning their Fedora Server 27 Modular Edition work last year, Fedora developers interested in modularizing Fedora packaging have drawn up new plans that are now approved by the Fedora Council.

The past few months Fedora Linux has been working on shipping free software AAC audio codec support and that's moved ahead but at least initially they are calling the AAC decoder "crippled."

As upstream Glibc is working on deprecating libcrypt for its eventual removal from the codebase, Fedora developers are looking at using libxcrypt for their hashing/encoding crypto library.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise as Fedora Linux normally ships with the very latest upstream toolchain components and with Fedora 28 it will be no different.

The latest in the long list of planned features/changes for Fedora 28 come down to an AArch64 promotion.

If Fedora developers are successful, Fedora 28 will feature secure and properly supported Thunderbolt 3 device handling out-of-the-box.

When talking about the Fedora/RedHat Anaconda installer it still brings back bad memories from the Anaconda fallout a few years ago when they went through some painful transitions that also led to release delays. In 2018, Fedora/RedHat developers are taking up the initiative of modularizing the Anaconda installer.

With more developers returning to their activities after the holidays, feature work on Fedora 28 is heating up.

If you are running Fedora Rawhide (their daily/development packages) and using an Intel mobile chipset, be forewarned that they are enabling the SATA link power change that runs the slight risk of potentially causing disk corruption.

Earlier this month the Fedora Modular working group decided to throw in the towel on Fedora Modular Server 27 and instead to do a "classic" server edition. We now have more details on how the eventual re-architected Modular Server should look for F28.

Fedora Linux this year picked up support for more multimedia codecs, continued innovating on both the Linux desktop/workstations and servers, the Fedora/RedHat developers continued a lot of upstream improvements throughout the Linux landscape, their Wayland support continues to be solid, and they continued shipping the latest and greatest packages in their distribution releases.

The Fedora Project's plans on delivering an initial "Fedora 27 Modular Server" build constructed under their new packaging principles has been thwarted.