Fedora 36 is releasing this morning as what is yet another release in recent times of being a very robust and bleeding-edge yet stable and reliable Linux distribution. I've already been running Fedora Workstation 36 and Fedora Server 36 snapshots on various systems in my benchmarking lab and this release has proven to be quite solid while adding new features and polish on top of the excellent Fedora 35.
After being delayed a few weeks from their original release target, Fedora 36 is now primed for release next week Tuesday.
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 Linux is looking at tightening up its cryptographic policies with next year's Fedora 38/39 releases but for Fedora 37 later this year they will likely begin warning users around the planned changes.
Bringing back memories from the time that Fedora multi-week release delays were pretty much a given, Fedora Linux 36 has once again been delayed and now won't be out until at least 10 May.
Laid out earlier this month was a change proposal for removing legacy X.Org drivers with the Fedora 37 release later this year.
Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support.
While during these crazy times it feels like Fedora transitioned from Yum to DNF yesterday, it's already been a half-decade since the DNF package manager has been the default on Fedora. Next year with Fedora 38 they are looking at further evolving package management by way of MicroDNF.
In addition to removing legacy X.Org drivers, deprecating legacy BIOS support, and signing RPM contents another Fedora 37 change proposal submitted this past week is for upgrading against RPM 4.18.
Adding to the interesting changes being worked on for Fedora 37 due out later this year is the removal of legacy X.Org drivers. Fedora is looking at removing the legacy graphics driver paths that are incompatible with running Wayland.
For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems.
With Fedora 36 working its way towards release later this month, more developer attention and planning is turning to Fedora 37 that will be released this autumn. One of the changes being talked about this week is for signing RPM contents for a means of trusting the files that are executed.
When it comes to system recovery on Linux, users are most often only left with a command-line for trying to recover from a failed kernel boot, borked boot loader configuration, or other show-stopping problems. With Fedora Workstation right now they have only their CLI-based Linux recovery process but are eyeing the possibility of creating a complementary GUI-based recovery environment.
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller took to Twitter on Sunday with a long series of tweets of his personal opinion going after NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and encouraging the company to be more like Intel and AMD with regards to open-source driver support.
For Fedora 37 later this year the Linux distribution is looking at providing support for zero touch onboarding for IoT / edge devices.
After a slight delay the Fedora 36 beta images are officially available today.
As part of wanting to drop unused i686 package builds from Fedora Linux, Fedora developers -- and in particular the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee -- want to know from the community what i686 (x86 32-bit) packages users still make use of.
The latest change to be proposed for the Fedora 37 release later this year is encouraging package maintainers to drop unused 32-bit x86 (i686) packages.
The Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite immutable OS spins of Fedora Linux are looking at mounting /sysroot read-only by default for where the operating system assets are stored.
While curl and the cURL library are most commonly used for HTTP(S) and FTP usage, this widely-used software also supports a plethora of other network protocols. In order to save disk space by default and also exposing its cURL packages to less security bugs by default, Fedora is looking at shipping "minimal" versions by default of its cURL packages.
Following the nasty local privilege escalation vulnerability that was disclosed last month for Polkit's pkexec, Fedora developers are hoping to make pkexec optional later this year with Fedora 37.
Red Hat with the Fedora community have been working for years now to make Cockpit very capable for a web-based interface for administering Linux servers. In addition to this year working on shifting their Anaconda installer to a web-based interface that makes use of Cockpit, from this web management portal they are wanting to make it easier to setup file sharing with NFS and Samba.
It should hardly come as a surprise given Fedora's history of always shipping with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), but with this spring's Fedora 36 the plan is to ship with the yet-to-be-released GCC 12 and other very latest open-source compiler toolchain components.
Longtime Linux users will likely recall when it was commonplace to modify /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* files for managing your network connections. Fortunately, that's largely a thing of the past and Fedora 36 is looking to remove support for those legacy network configuration files from new Fedora installs.
A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level.
Fedora had another successful year and anecdotally enthusiasm around the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution grew a lot this year among Linux power users. As has been the case for years, Fedora releases have been among the first to feature new Linux innovations from the desktop down the stack -- many of which have been spearheaded by Red Hat engineers. Helping its cause for the past several years is that they have managed to deliver releases on-time (or close to it) and haven't been like some of the past distant releases that were rather buggy and other headaches stemming from the constant flow of changes. Fedora 34 and Fedora 35 this year were great releases and continued pushing the distribution on an upward trajectory.
Fedora is often on the bleeding-edge of changes for tier-one Linux distributions but not all of them are very technical in nature but sometimes just cosmetic alterations. Among the latest batch of change proposals for next spring's Fedora 36 is to change the default font.
Fedora 36 is planning to use plocate as its new provider of the locate command for finding files on file-systems. Plocate should make for even faster locating of files on disk as well as doing so using less CPU cycles.
Fedora 36 feature work continues building up for what will make another exciting update to this Linux distribution come April. The latest approval is more exciting work on the OSTree / CoreOS front.
While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too.
1080 Fedora news articles published on Phoronix.