What's new in Fedora 36

Tomorrow, at least for those of us who live in the southern hemisphere, the year really begins. January and February are vacation months, and with all the summer resorts back and the school year starting, we're just getting started. Something similar happens with Linux distributions, because although there were some releases in the first two months of the year, It is in March when two of the most popular distributions launch their betas preparing for the final releases in April.

We are talking about Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish (whose news we already commented in a previous article) and Fedora 36. This time, if all goes well, the hat's distribution will be ahead of Canonical's by a few days.

The planned calendar is as follows:

• beta version: 1 March 2022 if all goes well or March 22, 2022 if additional time is needed.
• Release Date Confirmation of the final version: April 14, 2022.
• Release date: April 19, 2022 if all goes well or April 26, 2022 if additional time is needed.

These are what's new in Fedora 36

Fedora 36 will come with such new components that at the time of this writing they are still in the testing phase. Version 5.17 of the Linux kernel and the GNOME 42 desktop.

If you still use floppy disks, this is your year, Kernel 5.17 fixes an old bug that caused lock errors on these storage media. In addition, support for temperature monitoring is added to the AMD Zen family of processors and improvements to ARM/SoC support and performance of all file systems.

Other updates involve random number generator modules, page table check support, and x86 straight line speculation mitigation support.

We have talked a lot in recent days about the GNOME 42 desktop and the improvements are those already mentioned for Ubuntu; revamped applications and packages migrated to libadwaita version 1.0, performance improvements in Mutter and GNOME Shell and a new image or video screenshot utility.

other developments

A graphic novelty that does not come from GNOME is that Abandoning DejaVu as the default font in favor of Google's Noto font. This is intended to achieve a better experience and consistent text rendering across the desktop.

There is also a change in updates. In Fedora 36 only dependencies recommended by the developers will be installed. Any dependencies not previously installed will not be updated. And speaking of updates, OpenJDK, the community implementation of the Java Language Development Kit, jumps from version 11 to 17.

A decision that does not change anything for end users, but improves compatibility with other members of the Red Hat family is that the RPM package database is moved from the /var directory to the /usr directory. It thus follows a decision by other RPM-based distributions like openSUSE and Fedora rpm-ostree-based systems like Kinoite or Silverblue.

They have to thank me for this. It was enough that he decided to leave NVIDIA for another brand of graphics card. for developers to get their act together. Wayland graphics server now works by default with proprietary NVIDIA driver. This does not mean that such a driver is installed, only that it is supported. What you will get is the Noveau driver, Wayland as the graphics server, and the option to switch to X11 on the splash screen.

Wayland will also be the default option for distributions that use SSDM for graphical login such as KDE Spin and Kinoite.

Another change has to do with the assignment of privileges. From now on, if there is only one registered user, that will be the administrator user by default. It is the same as what happens with Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Application versions

Desks

• KDE Plasma 5.24
• Xfce 4.16
• LxQt 1.0.0
• GNOME 42

Programming languages ​​and applications

• PHP 8.1
• Ruby on Rails 7.0
• Open JDK 17
• Django 4.0
• gcc 12
• glibc 2.35
• Golang 1.18
• Open SSL 3.0
• Ruby 3.1
• Ansible 5
• Firefox 96
• LibreOffice 7.3