Fedora Linux 38 introduces several new Spins — variants that showcase different desktop environments. The popular Budgie Desktop environment, first packaged for Fedora in F37, now has its own Spin. The Fedora Budgie Spin aims to provide the premiere Budgie Desktop experience on top of Fedora Linux, the leading edge platform for developers and users alike.
For fans of tiling window managers, we now offer the Sway window manager in a Spin and in an rpm-ostree version we call “Sericea”. Sway uses the modern Wayland protocol and aims to be a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager.
If you want to use Fedora Linux on your mobile device, F38 introduces a Phosh image. Phosh is a Wayland shell for mobile devices based on Gnome. This is an early effort from our Mobility SIG. If your device isn’t supported yet, we welcome your contributions!
Fedora Workstation focuses on the desktop experience. As usual, Fedora Workstation features the latest GNOME release. GNOME 44 includes a lot of great improvements, including a new lock screen, a “background apps” section on the quick menu, and improvements to accessibility settings. In addition, enabling third-party repositories now enables an unfiltered view of applications on Flathub.
With this release, we’ve shortened the default timeout when services shut down. This helps your system power off faster — important when you need to grab your laptop and go.
Microdnf — the lighter-weight version of the default package manager — is replaced by dnf5. dnf5 brings performance improvements, a smaller memory footprint, and a new daemon that can provide an alternative to PackageKit. You can start testing dnf5 now before it becomes the default in a future Fedora Linux release.
For mainframe admins, we increased the minimal architecture level for IBM Z hardware to z13. This enables you to benefit from the new features of that platform and get better CPU performance.
Following our “First” foundation, we’ve updated key programming language and system library packages, including gcc 13, Golang 1.20, LLVM 16, Ruby 3.2, TeXLive2022, PHP 8.2, and many more.
