Release of Fedora 34 Linux distribution

Fedora 34 Linux distribution released. Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, CoreOS, Fedora IoT Edition products, as well as a set of “spins” with live builds of KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, i3, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE desktop environments are ready for download and LXQt. Builds are generated for x86_64, Power64, ARM64 (AArch64) architectures and various devices with 32-bit ARM processors. Publishing Fedora Silverblue builds is delayed.

The most notable improvements in Fedora 34 are:

• All audio streams have been moved to the PipeWire media server, which is now the default instead of PulseAudio and JACK. Using PipeWire allows you to provide professional audio processing capabilities in a regular desktop edition, get rid of fragmentation and unify the audio infrastructure for different applications.

  In past releases, Fedora Workstation used the PulseAudio background process to process audio, and applications used a client library to interact with this process, mix and manage audio streams. Professional sound processing used the JACK sound server and associated client library. To ensure compatibility, instead of libraries for interacting with PulseAudio and JACK, a layer that works through PipeWire has been added, which allows you to keep the work of all existing PulseAudio and JACK clients, as well as applications delivered in the Flatpak format. For older clients using the low-level ALSA API, an ALSA plugin is installed that directs audio streams directly to PipeWire.

• Builds with the KDE desktop have been switched to use Wayland by default. Moved X11 based session to option. Fedora 34's release of KDE Plasma 5.20 is said to be near feature parity with X11 on top, including fixes for screencasting and middle-click paste. To work when using NVIDIA proprietary drivers, the kwin-wayland-nvidia package is used. Compatibility with X11 applications is provided using the XWayland component.
• Improved Wayland support. Added the ability to use the XWayland component on systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Wayland-based environments support working in headless mode, which allows you to run desktop components on remote server systems with access via VNC or RDP.
• The Fedora Workstation desktop has been updated to the GNOME 40 release and the GTK 4 library. In GNOME 40, the virtual desktops in the Activities Overview mode have been moved to landscape orientation and are displayed as a continuously scrolling chain from left to right. Each desktop shown in overview mode provides a visual representation of the available windows that are dynamically panned and zoomed as the user interacts. A seamless transition between the list of programs and virtual desktops is provided. Improved organization of work in the presence of multiple monitors. The design of many programs has been modernized. GNOME Shell provides the use of the GPU for rendering shaders.
• All editions of Fedora have moved to use the systemd-oomd mechanism to respond early to system memory shortages instead of the earlier earlyoom process. Systemd-oomd is based on the PSI (Pressure Stall Information) kernel subsystem, which allows user-space analysis of information about the waiting time for obtaining various resources (CPU, memory, I / O) to accurately assess the level of system load and slowdown patterns. PSI makes it possible to detect the beginning of the occurrence of delays due to lack of resources and selectively terminate the work of resource-intensive processes at a stage when the system is not yet in a critical state and does not begin to intensively cut the cache and push data to the swap partition.
• The Btrfs filesystem, which has been the default in desktop flavors of Fedora since the last release (Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE, etc.), has transparent data compression enabled using the ZSTD algorithm. Compression is the default for new installations of Fedora 34. Users of already installed systems can enable compression by adding the flag "compress=zstd:1" to /etc/fstab and running "sudo btrfs filesystem defrag -czstd -rv / /home/" to compress already available data. To evaluate the effectiveness of compression, you can use the "compsize" utility. It is noted that storing data in a compressed form not only saves disk space, but also increases the life of SSD drives by reducing the volume of write operations, and also increases the speed of reading and writing large highly compressible files on slow drives.
• Among the official editions of the distribution, the version with the i3 window manager, which offers a tiled window layout mode on the desktop, is adopted.
• KDE desktop imaging has begun for AArch64-based systems, in addition to builds with GNOME and Xfce desktops, and images for server systems.
• A new Comp Neuro Container image has been added that includes a selection of modeling and simulation applications useful in neuroscience research.
• The edition for the Internet of Things (Fedora IoT), which offers a system environment truncated to a minimum, which is updated atomically by replacing the entire system image, and applications are separated from the main system using isolated containers (podman is used for management), support for ARM boards has been added Pine64, RockPro64 and Jetson Xavier NX, as well as improved support for boards based on i.MX8 SoCs such as 96boards Thor96 and Solid Run HummingBoard-M. The use of hardware failure tracking mechanisms (watchdog) for automatic system recovery is provided.
• The formation of separate packages with libraries used in projects based on Node.js has been stopped. Instead, Node.js is provided with only basic packages with an interpreter, header files, primary libraries, binary modules, and basic package management tools (NPM, yarn). Applications shipped in the Fedora repository using Node.js are allowed to build all their dependencies into one package, without splitting and separating the libraries used into separate packages. Embedding libraries will get rid of the clutter of small packages, make it easier to maintain packages (previously, the maintainer spent more time reviewing and testing hundreds of packages with libraries than on the main package with the program), rid the infrastructure of library conflicts, and solve problems with linking to library versions (maintainers will include verified and tested versions in the package).
• The FreeType font engine has been switched to use the HarfBuzz glyph shaping engine. The use of HarfBuzz in FreeType has improved the quality of hinting (smoothing the outline of a glyph when rasterized to improve legibility on low-resolution screens) when displaying text in languages ​​with complex text layout, in which glyphs can be formed from several characters. In particular, the use of HarfBuzz eliminates the problem of ignoring when hinting ligatures for which there are no separate Unicode characters.
• Removed the ability to disable SELinux at run time - disabling via /etc/selinux/config (SELINUX=disabled) is no longer supported. After SELinux initialization, LSM handlers are now set to read-only mode, which improves protection against attacks aimed at disabling SELinux after exploiting vulnerabilities that allow changing the contents of kernel memory. To disable SELinux, you can reboot the system by passing the "selinux=0" parameter on the kernel command line. The ability to switch between "enforcing" and "permissive" modes during the boot process is preserved.
• The Xwayland DDX component, which provides X.Org Server launch for organizing the execution of X11 applications in Wayland-based environments, has been moved to a separate package built from a fresh codebase that does not depend on stable releases of the X.Org server.
• Ensured that all updated systemd services are restarted at once after the transaction is completed in the RPM package manager. If earlier the service was restarted immediately after updating each package that intersected with it, now a queue is formed and services are restarted at the very end of the RPM session, after all packages and libraries have been updated.
• Images for ARMv7 boards (armhfp) have been switched to use UEFI by default.
• The size of the virtual swap device provided by the zRAM engine has been increased from a quarter to half the size of physical memory, and is also capped at 8 GB. The change allows you to successfully run the Anaconda installer on a system with a small amount of RAM.
• Delivered in the stable branch of crate packages for the Rust language. Packages are provided with the "rust-" prefix.
• To reduce the size of the installation iso images, a clean SquashFS is provided, without the nested EXT4 layer, which was used for historical reasons.
• Unified GRUB bootloader configuration files for all supported architectures, regardless of EFI support.
• To reduce disk space consumption, files with firmware used by the Linux kernel are compressed (starting with kernel 5.3, loading firmware from xz-archives is supported). When unpacked, all firmwares occupy about 900 MB, and when compressed, their size was reduced by half.
• The ntp package (server for precise time synchronization) has been replaced by a fork of ntpsec.
• The xemacs, xemacs-packages-base, xemacs-packages-extra, and neXtaw packages have been deprecated and have long since ceased development. The nscd package has been deprecated - systemd-resolved is now used to cache the host database, and sssd can be used to cache named services.
• The xorg-x11-* collections of X11 utilities have been discontinued, each utility is now offered in a separate package.
• The use of the name master in the git repositories of the project has been discontinued, since this word has recently been considered politically incorrect. Git repositories now use "main" as the default branch name, and package repositories such as src.fedoraproject.org/rpms use the "rawhide" branch.
• Updated package versions including: GCC 11, LLVM/Clang 12, Glibc 2.33, Binutils 2.35, Golang 1.16, Ruby 3.0, Ruby on Rails 6.1, BIND 9.16, MariaDB 10.5, PostgreSQL 13. Updated LXQt 0.16.0 and Xfe 4.16.
• New logo introduced.

At the same time, for Fedora 34, the "free" and "nonfree" repositories of the RPM Fusion project were put into operation, in which packages with additional multimedia applications (MPlayer, VLC, Xine), video / audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers, game programs, emulators.

Source: opennet.ru