Fedora 33 will switch to Vi for Nano and discontinuing BIOS support is discussed

Fedora developers they have not remained with their arms crossed in the face of the current problem that is experienced by the pandemic and that is have released several news in recent days quite interesting as far as future versions of the distribution are concerned and especially for Fedora 33.

As within the changes that are contemplated for Fedora 33, they announced that they plan to make a change which is to go from using the default text editor "Vi" to take the proposal made by Chris Murphy of the working group on the development of Fedora Workstation which consists in implementing Nano.

This proposal is not yet fully approved by the Committee, FESCO (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical part of the development of the Fedora distribution.

As motive to use the nano text editor as the default instead of vi, the desire to make the distribution more accessible is mentioned for beginners, providing an editor that can be used by any user you do not have a special knowledge of the working methods in the Vi editor.

At the same time, it is planned to continue with delivering the vim-minimal package in the basic distribution package (the direct call to vi will remain) and providing the ability to change the default editor to vi or vim at the user's request.

Also, Fedora doesn't currently set the $ EDITOR environment variable, and by default in commands like "git commit" it is called vi.

Another change that Fedora developers released and are discussing, is the subject of stopping the boot using the classic BIOS and leave the option to install only on systems that support UEFI.

This, was put on the table, since it is observed that the systems based on the Intel platform have been shipped from UEFI since 2005, and by 2020 Intel planned to stop supporting BIOS on client systems and data center platforms.

The discussion about rejecting BIOS support in Fedora too is due to the simplification of the implementation of selective display technology from the boot menu, in which the menu is hidden by default and is shown only after a crash or activation of the option in GNOME.

For UEFI, the necessary functionality is already available in sd-boot, but when using the BIOS it requires patches for GRUB2.

In discussion, some developers disagreed with the discontinuation of BIOS support, as the cost of optimization will be the termination of the ability to use new versions of Fedora on some laptops and PCs released before 2013 and shipped with UEFI-compliant non-vBIOS graphics cards.

It also mentions the need to start Fedora on virtualization systems that only support BIOS.

Moreover other changes discussed for deployment on Fedora 33 include:

• Use of the default Btrfs file system on desktop and portable editions of Fedora. Using the built-in Btrfs partition manager will solve the problems of running out of free disk space when mounting the / and / home directories separately.
  With Btrfs, these partitions can be placed in two subsections, mounted separately, but using the same disk space.
  Btrfs will also allow you to use features like snapshots, transparent data compression, correct isolation of input / output operations via cgroups2, resizing partitions on the fly.
• It is planned to add a background SID process (Storage Instantiation Daemon) to track the status of devices in various storage subsystems (LVM, multipath, MD) and call handlers when certain events occur, for example to activate and deactivate devices . SID works as a plug-in in udev and responds to events in udev, eliminating the need to create complicated udev rules to interact with various classes of devices and storage subsystems that are difficult to maintain and debug.