what appeared and what disappeared in the release of Fedora Linux 38. Yes, yes, it is already out

A few days ago came out the expected release of Fedora Linux 38. The developers have made many changes, including both adding new features and removing / replacing obsolete. You can already download Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition, and Live builds to see what’s new for yourself. Well, if there is no time for this yet, then the details are under the cut.


  • One of the expected changes is the update of the desktop in Fedora Workstation to the release of GNOME 44. In particular, the GNOME Shell user shell and the Mutter compositing manager have been transferred to GTK4. In addition, a large number of changes have been added to the configurator. One of the most notable is the addition of a new Bluetooth section.
  • To parse keys and digital signatures, the RPM package manager uses the Sequoia package, which includes a Rust version of OpenPGP. It is worth noting that previous versions of the distribution used their own OpenPGP parsing code, which has unresolved issues and limitations.
  • In addition, the first stage of the transition to the updated boot process, which was previously proposed by Lennart Pottering, has already been implemented. What is the difference? Now, instead of the initrd image, the unified kernel image UKI (Unified Kernel Image) is used. It, in turn, is generated in the infrastructure of the distribution and the digitally signed distribution. The advantage is that UKI combines in one file the handler for loading the kernel from UEFI (UEFI boot stub), the Linux kernel image and the initrd system environment loaded into memory. And when calling UKI from UEFI, you can check the integrity and validity of the digital signature of both the kernel and the contents of the initrd. At the first stage, UKI support was added to the bootloader, plus a toolkit for installing and updating UKI appeared. The developers have created an experimental UKI image designed to work with virtual machines with a limited set of components and drivers.
  • In addition, it is planned to use the new Microdnf package manager instead of DNF, and the first stage of this replacement has already been completed. At the moment, the manager’s toolkit has been rather heavily redesigned, supporting all the main features of DNF, but at the same time gaining high performance and compactness.

  • Assemblies for mobile devices are generated. They come with the Phosh shell, which is based on GNOME technologies and the GTK library, uses the Phoc composite server running on top of Wayland, and their own on-screen squeekboard keyboard. It is worth noting that the environment was developed by the well-known company Purism as an analogue of GNOME Shell for the Librem 5 smartphone (we once wrote about it). Well, then this environment became part of the unofficial GNOME projects, now it is used by postmarketOS, Mobian and some firmware for Pine64 devices.
  • There is also a new build of Fedora Budgie Spin with a Budgie graphical shell based on GNOME technologies, the Budgie Window Manager (BWM) and a proprietary implementation of the GNOME Shell. The build base is a panel that is somewhat similar in concept to regular desktop panels. In this case, all panel elements are applets. Accordingly, the placement and composition of applets can be changed without problems.

  • There is a new Fedora Sway Spin build with custom Sway built using the Wayland protocol and fully compatible with the i3 tiled window manager and i3bar. It adds components such as swayidle (background process with KDE idle protocol implementation), swaylock (screen saver), mako (notification manager), grim (creating screenshots), slurp (selecting an area on the screen), wf-recorder (video capture ), waybar (application bar), virtboard (on-screen keyboard), wl-clipboard (clipboard management), wallutils (desktop wallpaper management). They are needed for comfortable customization of the user environment.
  • Anaconda installer got mdadm toolkit instead of dmraid. This was done to support firmware-provided software RAID (BIOS RAID, Firmware RAID, Fake RAID).
  • The team did not forget about a simplified installer for installing images with the Fedora IoT edition on IoT devices. It is based on coreos-installer and uses a direct copy of a pre-built OStree image without user interaction.
  • In order to improve system security, X-server and Xwayland do not allow clients to connect from systems that have a different endianness.
  • Another new feature is building packages with the “_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3” protection mode enabled. This is done to detect various buffer overflows when executing string functions, which are defined in the string.h header file. What is the difference from “_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2” mode? Mainly in additional checks.

  • Of the minor changes, we can note the decrease in the timer for forced termination of systemd units during shutdown, reduced from 2 minutes to 45 seconds.

  • Updated package versions, including Ruby 3.2, gcc 13, LLVM 16, Golang 1.20, PHP 8.2, binutils 2.39, glibc 2.37, gdb 12.1, GNU Make 4.4, cups-filters 2.0b, TeXLive 2022, ImageMagick 7, PostgreSQL 15.
  • And, of course, the “free” and “nonfree” repositories of the RPM Fusion project are already ready. They include packages with additional multimedia applications, video/audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers, game programs and emulators.

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If someone has already installed the new release, share – how do you like it, do you like everything, or are there any drawbacks?

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