Tomorrow is the first of September. For those of us in the southern hemisphere, it means the arrival of spring. For those who live on the other side of the Tropic of Capricorn, autumn and back to school. But, wherever you are, if you are a developer of two of the most important Linux distributions, there is no doubt that you have a lot of work ahead of you. In this post we will tell you what we will know about Ubuntu and Fedora and the news that the latest versions of the year will bring.
Both Ubuntu and Fedora adopt a bi-annual release system and April and October are the chosen months. The difference is that Ubuntu in April of even years releases a version of extended support for 5 years. That was the case of the current 22.04.
What we know about Ubuntu and Fedora
Ubuntu
The next version of Ubuntu It will arrive almost a month after spring (autumn) on October 20. and in addition to the number 22.10 it will have a name with a lot of rhythm: Kinectic Kudu.
The kudu (I don't know if the word has a translation) is an African antelope whose males have large spiral-shaped antlers. I beg you to refrain from making jokes because the time is not right. The adjective kinetic alludes to the idea of movement.
Why is it called that? because it sounds good. Gone are the days when Canonical was something of an SME where Mark Shuttleworth was concerned that the name followed an alphabetical order and summarized the features that the new version was expected to have. Today their target customers are large corporations. Also, there are not so many animals or so many adjectives. Can you imagine having to explain what features to expect from a distribution called Masturbated Monkey?
Regarding the news that we can expect, the most outstanding are those that come with GNOME 43. Some of them are:
- Quick changes: You will no longer need to access the settings panel to change input or output devices, select a network or activate dark mode. Everything can be done from the top bar.
- New design for settings panel and appearance selection.
- New Desktop Settings Tool: Desktop settings that don't affect appearance (such as icon size) now have their own settings panel. In addition, more options are incorporated.
- New features in Nautilus such as toolbar resizing to window width, sidebar fading in and out as needed, unit formatting from the sidebar, and list view redesign.
Regarding the news that does not have to do with GNOME, Pipewire will be the new default audio server which promises to improve compatibility with Bluetooth audio equipment in addition to consuming fewer resources and having fewer errors. The new version of the Mutter window manager allows for better scroll wheel performance in Wayland and X11 and direct multi-monitor browsing.
Fedora
The distro in the hat hasn't used names for a long time, so the next one will only have number 37. For those who like gambling, the October release of Ubuntu will be number 37 in case you want to put a few euros on that number.
Fedora 37 is expected on October 16, although its release could be postponed to 25. It will ship with GNOME 43 so many of the features we discussed for Ubuntu will also be available. Other versions will use KDE Plasma 5.26, Xfce 4.16 MATE 1.24 and LXQt 1.1.0 desktops.
After the launchwill experimentally release an installer based on a web interface that will replace the traditional one (And, for my taste unusable) Anaconda.
In October, the stripped-down version of Fedora known as Core OS, intended for container management, is released as an official flavor.
As we can see, neither of them brings the great novelty. I suppose that this is a symptom that Linux has already reached its maturity and that innovations will have to be found elsewhere.