Beta testing of the Fedora Linux 36 distribution has begun. The beta release marked the transition to the final stage of testing, in which only critical bug fixes are allowed. The release is scheduled for April 26th. The release covers Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora IoT and Live builds shipped as spins with KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE and LXQt desktop environments. Builds are generated for x86_64, Power64, ARM64 (AArch64) architectures and various devices with 32-bit ARM processors.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 36 are:
- Fedora Workstation has been updated to the GNOME 42 release, which adds environment-wide dark style settings for the interface and transitioned many applications to use GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which offers ready-made widgets and objects for building applications that comply with the new GNOME HIG recommendations (Human Interface Guidelines).
Style confusion in GNOME 42 has been criticized - some programs are styled according to the new GNOME HIG guidelines, while others continue to use the old style or combine elements of the new and old styles. For example, in the new text editor, the buttons are not textured and the window is displayed with rounded corners, in the file manager, the buttons are framed and less rounded window corners are used, in gedit, the buttons are clearly highlighted, more contrasting and placed on a darker background, and the bottom corners of the window are sharp .
- For systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, the GNOME session based on the Wayland protocol is enabled by default, which was previously only used when using open source drivers. The ability to select a GNOME session running on top of a traditional X server has been retained. Previously, enabling Wayland on systems with NVIDIA drivers was hampered by the lack of support for OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration in X11 applications running with the XWayland DDX (Device-Dependent X) component. In the new branch of NVIDIA drivers, the issues have been fixed and the performance of OpenGL and Vulkan in X applications launched using XWayland is now almost the same as running under a normal X server.
- The atomically updatable editions of Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite, which offer monolithic GNOME and KDE images that are not packaged and built using the rpm-ostree toolkit, have been redesigned to place the /var hierarchy on a separate Btrfs subkey, allowing snapshots of /var content to be manipulated independently from other system partitions.
- The packages and edition of the LXQt desktop distribution have been updated to LXQt 1.0.
- When systemd is running, unit file names are output, which makes it easier to determine which services are started and stopped. For example, "Starting Frobnicating Daemon..." will now display "Starting frobnicator.service - Frobnicating Daemon..." instead of "Starting Frobnicating Daemon...".
- The default fonts for most languages ββare Noto instead of DejaVu.
- The choice of possible encryption algorithms available in GnuTLS is now whitelisted, ie. allowable algorithms are explicitly marked instead of excluding invalid ones. This approach allows, if desired, to return support for disabled algorithms for certain applications and processes.
- Information about which rpm-package the given file belongs to has been added to the executable files and libraries in the ELF format. systemd-coredump uses this information to reflect the package version when sending crash notifications.
- The fbdev drivers used for Framebuffer output have been replaced with the simpledrm driver, which uses the EFI-GOP or VESA framebuffer provided by the UEFI firmware or BIOS for output. To ensure backward compatibility, a layer is used to emulate the fbdev device.
- Preliminary support for containers in OCI/Docker formats has been added to the rpm-ostree-based atomically updating stack, which makes it easy to create container images and transfer the system environment to containers.
- RPM package manager databases moved from /var/lib/rpm to /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm with /var/lib/rpm replaced with a symbolic link. This placement is already used in rpm-ostree-based builds and SUSE/openSUSE distributions. The reason for the transfer is the inseparability of the RPM database with the contents of the /usr partition, in which the RPM packages are actually located (for example, placement in different partitions complicates managing FS snapshots and rolling back changes, and in the case of /usr transfer, information about the connection with installed packages is lost) .
- NetworkManager has dropped support for the ifcfg configuration format (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) by default in new installations. Since Fedora 33, NetworkManager uses the keyfile format by default.
- Hunspell dictionaries moved from /usr/share/myspell/ to /usr/share/hunspell/.
- The ability to simultaneously install different versions of the compiler for the Haskell language (GHC) is provided.
- The cockpit-module with a web interface is included in the composition for setting up file sharing via NFS and Samba.
- The default Java implementation is java-17-openjdk instead of java-11-openjdk.
- The locale management program mlocate has been replaced by plocate, a faster and less disk space-consuming alternative.
- Support for the old wireless stack used in the ipw2100 and ipw2200 drivers (Intel Pro Wireless 2100/2200) has been discontinued, which was replaced by the mac2007/cfg80211 stack back in 80211.
- In the Anaconda installer, in the interface for creating a new user, the checkbox for granting administrator rights to the added user is enabled by default.
- The nscd package, which was used to cache the host database, has been discontinued. nscd has been replaced by systemd-resolved, and sssd can be used to cache named services.
- The Stratis local storage management tool has been updated to version 3.0.0.
- Updated package versions, including 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