Few days ago Fedora 36 Beta Release Unveiled, version in which among the most significant changes we can find that the desktop environment was updated to GNOME 42 version, which adds environment-wide dark-style settings for the frontend and transitioned many applications to use GTK 4 and the libadwaita library, which provides out-of-the-box 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, as some programs are styled according to the new GNOME HIG guidelines, while others continue to use the old style or combine elements of the old and new styles.
For example, in the new text editor the buttons are untextured 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 set against a darker background, and the bottom corners of the window are straight.
For systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers, GNOME session based on 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 OpenGL and Vulkan performance in X applications launched with XWayland is now almost no different than running on a regular X server.
Another of the changes that stands out is when systemd is running, drive filenames are displayed, which makes it easy to determine which services are started and stopped. For example, “Starting Frobnicator Daemon…” will now display “Starting frobnicator.service – Frobnicating Daemon…” instead of “Starting Frobnicating Daemon…”.
Besides it added information to executable files and libraries in ELF format about which rpm package the given file belongs to. systemd-coredump uses this information to reflect the package version when sending crash notifications.
The fbdev drivers used for framebuffer output have been superseded by the simpledrm driver, which uses the EFI-GOP or VESA framebuffer provided by the BIOS or UEFI firmware for output. To ensure backward compatibility, a layer is used to emulate the fbdev device.
Added preliminary support for containers in OCI/Docker formats to the atomic update stack based on rpm-ostree , which makes it easy to create container images and port the system environment to containers.
The B'sRPM package manager data aces moved replaced with a symbolic link. This location is already used by 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, where the RPM packages are actually located (for example, placement on different partitions complicates FS snapshot management and rollback of changes, and in case of /usr transfer, information about connection with installed packages is lost).
NetworkManager has stopped supporting the ifcfg configuration format (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) by default on new installations.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- 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 cabin module with a web interface is included in the composition for configuring file sharing via NFS and Samba.
- The default Java implementation is java-17-openjdk instead of java-11-openjdk.
- The program for quickly finding a file called mlocate has been replaced by plocate, a faster and less disk-consuming analog.
- Support for the old wireless stack used in the ipw2100 and ipw2200 drivers (Intel Pro Wireless 2100/2200) has been discontinued, and was replaced by the mac80211/cfg80211 stack in 2007.
- In the Anaconda installer, in the interface for creating a new user, the checkbox to grant administrator rights to the user being added is enabled by default.
- The Stratis Local Storage Management Tool has been updated to version 3.0.0.
Finally it is worth mentioning that this beta release marked the transition to the final stage of testing, in which only critical bug fixes are allowed. The launch of the Final and stable version is scheduled for April 26.
For those interested in being able to test the beta, you can get it from the link below.