new version of the distribution. What's new and what's changed?
In the world of Linux distributions, everything is going according to plan. Fedora Linux 40 Developers released the final release April 23. Versions of Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition and Live builds are already ready. They come with KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, LXQt, Budgie and Sway desktop environments. Let's see what's new, what's been removed, and what's changed.
Important distribution changes:
In the final release, as expected, updated package versionsincluding LLVM 18, GCC 14, binutils 2.41, glibc 2.39, gdb 14.1, PHP 8.3, Ruby 3.3, Go 1.22, Java 21, AMD ROCm 6, Boost 1.83, 389 Directory Server 3.0.0, Podman 5, PostgreSQL 16, TBB (Thread Building Blocks) 2021.8, SQLAlchemy 2, Kubernetes 1.29.
It was decided to combine custom distributions that are developed by Fedora and updated atomically into one family. This is actually a new brand of Atomic Desktops, but the builds that have been developing for a long time have retained the old name: Fedora Silverblue based on GNOME and Fedora Kinoite based on KDE, as well as Fedora CoreOS and Fedora IoT. But the new builds of Fedora Sericea and Fedora Onyx are now distributed under the names Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
As previously reported, the GNOME desktop in Fedora Workstation has been updated to version 46. It has a lot of useful things, including a global search function, improving the performance of the file manager and terminal emulators, adding experimental support for the VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) mechanism, improving the output quality with fractional scaling, expanding the ability to connect to external services, updating the configurator and improving the notification system . In addition, GTK uses a new rendering engine, which is based on the Vulkan API.
In a manager such as DNF, the loading of metadata with all lists of files that are included in the packages is disabled. They are rarely needed, but they are large in size, which leads to slower operation.
Another new feature is the upgrade of the KDE desktop edition to the release of KDE 6. At the same time, support for the X11 protocol-based session has been discontinued. In order to run X11 applications, the XWayland DDX server is used. Of course, the reason for the discontinuation of session support with X11 has been announced – this is the deprecation of the X.Org server in RHEL 9 and the decision to completely remove it in the future major release of RHEL 10. Another reason is the replacement of the fbdev drivers with the simpledrm driver, which works correctly with Wayland , and of course, the appearance of Wayland support in Nvidia drivers.
The project is now in the second stage of transition to a modernized loading process – it was proposed by Lennart Potting. What is the difference? The difference is that instead of the initrd image, which is generated locally when installing the kernel package, a unified UKI (Unified Kernel Image) kernel image is used, generated in the distribution infrastructure and digitally signed by the distribution. Its advantage is that it combines in a single file the handler for loading the kernel from UEFI (UEFI boot stub), the Linux kernel image and the initrd system environment loaded into memory. During the UKI call from EFI, the integrity and validity of the digital signature is verified. And not only the kernel, but also the contents of the initrd.
As for the second stage, it is now possible to directly load UKI from the shim.efi UEFI module without using a separate bootloader (grub, sd-boot), support for using UKI on systems with Aarch64 architecture has been implemented and a version of the UKI image has been prepared for cloud environments and protected virtual machines.
The Zlib library was replaced with a fork of Zlib-ng, which is compatible with Zlib at the API level. It also provides additional optimizations to improve performance.
The repository now has a package with the PyTorch machine learning framework, available for installation with the dnf install pytorch command. It adds components for computing using a processor. Well, in the future, the use of GPUs with NPU accelerators will be added.
The osbuild toolkit is used to build minimal images for the ARM architecture.
The pam_userdb module has been moved from using BerkeleyDB to GDBM due to the BerkeleyDB 5.x branch being deprecated and the BerkeleyDB 6.x branch being moved to an unacceptable license. Bogofilter has been converted to use SQLite instead of BerkeleyDB (libdb).
Fedora IoT, the edition for Internet of Things devices, has been converted to use boot containers created using the OSTree toolkit and bootc technology.
The generation of delta updates of RPM packages has been stopped, allowing only the changed data relative to the already installed version of the package to be loaded during the update. Deltarpm support has been disabled in DNF and DNF5.
The developers did not ignore the NetworkManager configurator – it has a default mechanism for determining IPv4 address conflicts on the local network. Its essence is to send a test ARP packet before attaching the address to the network interface. Well, for wireless connections, a separate static MAC address is assigned.
Besides, appeared RPM Fusion repositories, in which packages with additional multimedia applications (MPlayer, VLC, Xine), video/audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and Nvidia drivers, game programs and emulators are available.
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