Fedora developers released recently introduced a new edition of Fedora, called «Kinoite» which is based on Fedora Silverblue technologies, but using KDE instead of GNOME as the desktop.
The monolithic Fedora Kinoite image is not split into separate packages, it is atomically updated and built from the official Fedora RPMs using the rpm-ostree toolkit.
About Fedora Kinoite
This newly released edition of Fedora Kinoite stands out for presenting a base environment (/ and / usr) mounted as read-only.
The data available for modification is found in the / var directory (including / etc is created as a symbolic link to / var / etc, / home as a link to / var home, and / opt as a link to / var / opt).
To install and update additional applications, the self-contained flatpak package system is used, with which applications are detached from the main system and run in a separate container, plus additional applications can be installed from Flathub, but work is in progress to create official Flatpak packages for Fedora with KDE applications.
The project has not yet received the status of an official Fedora revision and is in the process of development.
It is mentioned that it is planned that the first version is ready by the time Fedora 35 is built, but the trial versions are already available for review.
There are no ready-made images yet, and to install Fedora Kinoite, it is suggested to install Fedora Silverblue first and then replace the desktop with KDE by running the following commands:
curl -O https://tim.siosm.fr/downloads/siosm_gpg.pub
sudo ostree remote add kinoite https://siosm.fr/kinoite/ --gpg-import siosm_gpg.pub
sudo rpm-ostree rebase kinoite:fedora/33/x86_64/kinoite
sudo systemctl reboot
To update the base system and flatpak packages, you need to run the commands (there is no graphical interface to update yet):
rpm-ostree update
flatpak update
If you want to know more about it about Fedora Kinoite you can check the details In the following link.
Fedora 34 plans to migrate FreeType to HarfBuzz to improve hints
Moreover, the Fedora developers also mentioned that a FreeType engine will be implemented for the Fedora 34 version Fedora 34 programmed transfer fonts to use the glyphs HarfBuzz Design Engine.
The freetype-harfbuzz package is provided for testing on Fedora Rawhide. The change has not yet been reviewed by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), which is responsible for the technical development of the Fedora distribution.
Though, using HarfBuzz on FreeType is claimed to improve the quality of suggestions (smoothing the outline of a glyph when rasterized to improve readability on low resolution screens) when displaying text in languages with complex text layout, in which glyphs can be formed from multiple characters.
In particular, the use of HarfBuzz will eliminate the problem of ignoring when hinting at ligatures for which there are no separate Unicode characters. As a reminder, last year's translation of the Pango library to use HarfBuzz caused problems displaying old fonts.
Additionally, Note the approval of the FESCo Committee for all Fedora editions to use the systemd-oomd mechanism for an early response to out of memory in the system instead of the previously used earlyoom process.
Systemd-oomd is based on the PSI kernel subsystem (Pressure Stall Information), which allows user space to analyze information about the wait time to obtain various resources (CPU, memory, I / O) to accurately assess the level of system utilization and the nature of the slowdown.
PSI makes it possible to detect the occurrence of delays due to lack of resources and to selectively terminate the work of resource-intensive processes at a stage where the system is not yet in a critical state and does not begin to cut intensively the cache or send data to the swap partition.
Source: https://fedoraproject.org