Fedora 39 beta arrives with great improvements
The developers of the Fedora project they have made known Through a blog post, the availability of the beta version of the new version of Fedora 39, which marks the transition to the final testing stage, in which only critical errors are fixed.
With the presentation of this beta of Fedora 39 the transition to the second stage is marked of the process to modernize the boot process, with the creation of a single universal image UKI (Unified Kernel Image). The differences with classic boot come down to the use, instead of the initrd image generated on the local system when installing the kernel package, of a UKI unified kernel image, generated on the distribution infrastructure and digitally signed by the distribution.
Another of the changes that stands out is the addition of an official version of "Fedora Onyx" that comes with the Budgie desktop environment, which complements the classic version of Fedora Budgie Spin. The base environment is built from official Fedora RPMs using rpm-ostree and mounted in read-only mode. To install and update additional applications, a Flatpak packaging system is used, with which applications are separated from the main system and run in a separate container.
In addition to this, in Fedora 39 The assembly and delivery of updated modules has been interrupted separately, whose lifecycle is not tied to the main content of the distribution, and is supported independently of the distribution's releases. The reason for this change is due to the loss of interest in developing modules and problems with the maintenance of existing modules.
As for the internal components that we can find in the beta of Fedora 39, it is that The Linux Kernel 6.5 is supplied, systemd 254 and that the different desktop environments have been updated, for example in the main edition we can find GNOME 45, while the other versions are KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, Xfce 4.18, Budgie 10.8, Cinnamon 5.8 and LXQt 1.3.
Regarding the system parcel, NetworkManager provides automatic translation of existing connection profiles stored in the format ifcfg to a keyfile-based format, the Bash shell has command line color enabled by default.
Also Changed the way Flatpak packages are built in distribution. Instead of using modules when rebuilding packages with the "prefix=/app" parameter, a separate build target is used.
The topics QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt, which were used to give Qt applications similar configurations and styles to those of GNOME, have been discontinued so that these applications fit better into the GNOME environment. The reason cited is the stagnation of these themes and the problems when using them with some applications.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added default-fonts* metapackages to make it easier to update and install default fonts.
- Provided the ability to remove the tzdata package from the timezone database to reduce the size of isolated containers.
- The fedora-repos-modular package was removed from the base installation and the modular repository was disabled. The change made it possible to speed up the work of the DNF package manager by reducing the number of metadata checks and downloads.
- The default value of sysctl vm.max_map_count has been increased from 65530 to 1048576 to improve compatibility with Windows games launched through Wine or Steam.
- The createrepo_c utility by default uses the Zstd algorithm to compress repository metadata and stops generating metadata in the SQLite database.
- Removed the pam_console package, which was not used by default, had security issues, and could be replaced with systemd functionality.
Last but not least, it is worth mentioning that the transition to the new package manager DNF5 and the new web-based installer have been postponed until the release of Fedora 40. The planned removal of the org-x11-drv-vesa and xorg-x11-drv-fbdev drivers. At the same time, developers are considering ending support for X11-based sessions in Fedora 40 in distribution versions with KDE and GNOME.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Get the Fedora 39 beta
For those interested in trying the Fedora 39 beta, you can obtain the system image from the official website. The link is this.
Remember that it is never safe to use a pre-release version of a distribution on your main machine due to errors and possible data loss. If you understand the risks and decide to try the operating system, you will enjoy some interesting new features, such as the GNOME 45 desktop environment and improvements to the rpm package manager.