The release of Fedora Linux 36 has been announced. Products prepared for download include Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, CoreOS, Fedora IoT Edition, and live images provided as spins with desktop environments KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, and LXQt. The builds are designed for x86_64, Power64, ARM64 (AArch64) architectures, and various devices with 32-bit ARM processors. The release of Fedora Silverblue builds is delayed.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 36 are:
- The desktop environment for Fedora Workstation has been updated to GNOME 42, which introduces global settings for a dark theme across the interface and facilitates the transition of many applications to use GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which provides ready-to-use widgets and objects for building applications that comply with the new GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines). Most applications are designed in accordance with the new GNOME HIG guidelines, although some continue to use the old style or mix elements of both the new and old styles.
- For systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, a GNOME session based on the Wayland protocol is enabled by default, which was previously only used with open drivers. The option to select a GNOME session running on the traditional X server is retained. Earlier, enabling Wayland on systems with NVIDIA drivers was hindered by a lack of support for hardware acceleration of OpenGL and Vulkan in X11 applications using the DDX (Device-Dependent X) component of XWayland. In the new driver branch, these issues have been resolved, and the performance of OpenGL and Vulkan in X applications launched via XWayland now closely matches that under the standard X server.
- Atomically updatable editions, Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite, which offer monolithic images with GNOME and KDE, without separation into individual packages and built using rpm-ostree tools, have been reworked to host the hierarchy /var on a separate Btrfs subvolume, allowing manipulation of snapshots in /var independently from other system partitions.
- The packages and edition of the distribution with the LXQt desktop environment have been updated to version LXQt 1.0.
- During operation, systemd provides output of unit file names, making it easier to determine which services are starting and stopping. For instance, instead of "Starting Frobnicating Daemon...", it will now display "Starting frobnicator.service — Frobnicating Daemon...".
- By default, Noto fonts are employed for most languages instead of DejaVu.
- A whitelist of allowed encryption algorithms available in GnuTLS has been implemented for selecting usable algorithms, clearly specifying the acceptable algorithms rather than excluding the disallowed ones. This approach allows for the reinstatement of support for disabled algorithms for specific applications and processes if desired.
- Executable files and libraries in ELF format have been enhanced with information about which rpm package the file belongs to. In systemd-coredump, this information is used to reflect the package version when sending failure notifications.
- The fbdev drivers used for output via Framebuffer have been replaced by the simpledrm driver, which utilizes the EFI-GOP or VESA framebuffer provided by UEFI firmware or BIOS. To ensure backward compatibility, a layer is employed to emulate an fbdev device over the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem. This change notably retains the ability to use only DRM/KMS drivers. The process of adding new fbdev drivers to the Linux kernel was halted 7 years ago, and the remaining drivers primarily supported outdated hardware. For example, drivers such as atyfb (ATI Mach64, RageII, RageII+, RageIIc), aty128fb (ATI Rage128), s3fb (S3), savagefb (Savage), sisfb (SiS), tdfxfb (3Dfx), and tridentfb (Trident) will now be replaced with the universal simpledrm driver.
- Preliminary support for containers in OCI/Docker formats has been added to the stack for atomically updated images based on rpm-ostree, enabling easy creation of container images and transferring system environments into containers.
- The RPM package manager database has been moved from the directory /var/lib/rpm to /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm, with /var/lib/rpm replaced by a symbolic link. This layout is already used in rpm-ostree-based builds and in SUSE/openSUSE distributions. The reason for this relocation is the inseparability of the RPM database from the content of the /usr partition, where RPM packages are actually located (for example, placing them in different partitions complicates the management of filesystem snapshots and rolling back changes, and relocating /usr loses information about the relationship with installed packages).
- In NetworkManager, support for the ifcfg configuration format (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) has been discontinued by default in new installations. Starting with Fedora 33, the keyfile format is used by default in NetworkManager.
- Hunspell dictionaries have been moved from the directory /usr/share/myspell/ to /usr/share/hunspell/.
- Support for the simultaneous installation of different versions of the Haskell language compiler (GHC) has been provided.
- A cockpit module with a web interface for configuring file sharing via NFS and Samba has been included.
- The default implementation of Java has switched to the java-17-openjdk package instead of java-11-openjdk.
- The mlocate program for quick file searching by name has been replaced with plocate, which is faster and consumes less disk space.
- Support for the old wireless stack used in the ipw2100 and ipw2200 (Intel Pro Wireless 2100/2200) drivers has been discontinued, replaced by the mac80211/cfg80211 stack introduced back in 2007.
- In the Anaconda installer, the checkbox to grant administrative rights to the new user has been enabled by default in the user creation interface.
- The nscd package used for caching host and user databases (/etc/hosts, /etc/passwd, /etc/services, etc.) has been discontinued. systemd-resolved is now used for host caching, while sssd is used for user database caching.
- The toolkit for managing Stratis local storage has been updated to version 3.0.0.
- Package versions have been updated, including Linux kernel 5.17, GCC 12, LLVM 14, glibc 2.35, OpenSSL 3.0, Golang 1.18, Ruby 3.1, PHP 8.1, PostgreSQL 14, Autoconf 2.71, OpenLDAP 2.6.1, Ansible 5, Django 4.0, MLT 7, Podman 4.0, Ruby on Rails 7.0.
Source: opennet.ru
