Several days ago Fedora 34 Beta Release Unveiled (the preview version of the next version of Fedora) that use GNOME 40 as the default desktop environment and which marks the freezing of all the changes that will be included in the stable version.
GNOME 40 is distinguished by a horizontal workspace selector that aims to bring greater ergonomics to the work environment based largely on the interfaces often associated with tablets.
What's New in the Fedora 34 Beta?
The new version of Fedora uses the new GNOME 40 desktop, which brings improvements to the user experience To the general description of the GNOME shell, its enhancements have reorganized features like search, windows, workspaces, and applications to make them more space-consistent. GNOME 40 also includes improvements in handling multiple monitors and allows users to choose between workspaces only on their main screens or workspaces on all screens.
In addition, we can find Btrfs as the default file system which was included in Fedora 33 and will also be found in this new version of Fedora 34 Beta and that is Btrfs builds on this work by allowing transparent compression for more space storage. This is designed to help significantly increase the life of the media, as this compression will be critical to increasing the read and write performance of larger files, with the potential to add significant time savings to workflows.
What this means is better compression on solid state drives, which in turn should increase the shelf life of storage. Since SSDs have a limited lifespan, ease of charging is appreciated. The Btrfs update should also improve SSD read and write speeds.
Another change that is presented is the application PulseAudio is replaced by PipeWire for mixing and managing audio stream, with low latency for professional users as it is better designed to meet the needs of containers and applications that ship on Flatpaks, this change supports IT's growing shift to a containerized world .
The switch to PipeWire also creates space for a single audio infrastructure that can meet both personal and professional audio use cases, with the goal of ending the fragmentation of the audio landscape. According to those responsible for the Fedora project, the Fedora project plans to extend the user experience and configuration of the audio infrastructure with better integration throughout the system.
Also, it is mentioned that Fedora 34 Beta provides a better experience in low memory situations (OOM) by enabling systemd-oomd by default. Actions taken by systemd-oomd operate at the group level, aligning well with the lifecycle of systemd units.
Moreover, another feature The most interesting feature on the Wayland graphics stack is the display support that makes it possible for cloud servers to run a desktop that can be accessed remotely, atother than that, Wayland also received support for accelerated 3D graphics on Nvidia GPUs. and also a change was made to the default session selection in SDDM to prefer the Wayland-based KDE Plasma Desktop session over the X11-based one.
Lastly, Fedora 34 is rumored to have much better touchpad support, even though by default. touch panels must include support for horizontal and vertical swipe with three fingers.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it about all the changes related to this beta version of Fedora 34, you can check all the details by going to to the following link.
As soon as to those who are interested in being able to download and test the beta version, can get the system image from the following link.