Fedora 39 banner
The release of the new version of Fedora 39, which comes with a host of new features, updates, as well as interesting improvements and bug fixes.
Initially Fedora 39 presents the Linux Kernel 6.5 in which support is introduced MIDI 2.0 in ALSA, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, and Landlock p supportfor UML (User-Mode Linux). Additionally, the minimum size of the ESP (EFI system partition) used when installing Fedora has been increased from 200 to 500 MB due to lack of space for firmware updates. The 500MB limit matches the setting Microsoft has used since Windows 10.
On the installation side, the utility is now provided createrepo_c defaults to the Zstd algorithm to compress the repository metadata and stops generating metadata in the SQLite database. The package fedora-repos-modular removed from 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.
On the packaging part of the system Fedora 39 arrives with the desktop environment GNOME 45 which counts with a dynamic virtual desktop indicator in the panel, search performance has been improved, a camera indicator has been added, video playback has been hardware accelerated, the image viewfinder and camera app have been replaced, and the display style of sidebars, and the GTK 4.12 and libadwaita 1.4 libraries have been updated.
The topics QGnomePlatform and Adwaita-qt, which were used to give Qt applications similar configurations and styles to those of GNOME, have been discontinuedor 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.
Another change that Fedora 39 presents is to install and update additional applications, as a Flatpak packaging system is now used, with which applications are separated from the main system and run in a separate container.
Additionally, users managed through Active Directory, FreeIPA or LDAP have the option to use Passkeys technology, which allows passwordless authentication using biometric identifiers such as fingerprints or facial recognition, using a FIDO2 compatible device compatible with the libfido2 library.
Se has discontinued the assembly and delivery of separately updated modules, whose life cycle is not tied to the main content of the distribution, and support is provided independently of the distribution releases, which made it possible to ensure the coexistence of packages with different versions of the same application. The reason for ceasing support for modules is the loss of interest in developing modules and problems with maintaining existing modules (the last activity on pagure.io/modularity was observed more than 3 years ago).
Last but not least, it is also mentioned that preparatory work related to the second stage of the transition to the modernized loading process has been carried out. The differences from classic boot come down to the use, instead of the initrd image generated on the local system when installing the kernel package, of a unified kernel image UKI (Unified Kernel Image), generated on the distribution infrastructure and signed digitally for distribution. UKI combines the driver for loading the kernel from UEFI (UEFI boot stub), the Linux kernel image, and the initrd system environment loaded into memory into one file.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- NetworkManager provides automatic translation of existing connection profiles stored in the ifcfg format (/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) to a key file-based format.
- Provided the ability to remove the tzdata package from the timezone database to reduce the size of isolated containers.
- 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 package with man-pages-ru has been discontinued, since translations of man manuals into Russian are also included in the man-pages-l10n package.
- The way Flatpak packages are built in the distribution has been changed. Instead of using modules when rebuilding packages with the "prefix=/app" parameter, a separate build target is used.
- Imaging has begun with the LXQt user environment for the Aarch64 architecture.
- Fedora Cloud includes the ability to automatically reboot after installing package updates that require a system reboot.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about it and/or downloading the new version, you can do so from the following link.