By Jonathan Corbet
September 25, 2013
The
Fedora 20 alpha release was announced
on September 24. This release provides the first opportunity for many
outside the Fedora development community to see what is being planned for
the next version of Fedora which, according to
the current (revised)
schedule, is due to be released on December 3. This seems like as
good a time as any to take a look at what Fedora is up to and what Fedora
users can expect in Fedora 20.
It's not given its own billing in the Fedora 20
change list, but, for many users, one of the headline features may well
be the Wayland preview that is expected to be shipped as part of the
GNOME 3.10 release. It may well be the first time that it will be
possible to run a Wayland setup from within a major distribution. That
said, it seems unlikely that most users will actually want to do so; as
Christian Schaller put
it:
Well there will be a quite a few things missing or maybe not
working as expected. What we hope to have ready is a system where
you can have the option of a Wayland session available in GDM, so
that instead of logging into your normal X based session you log
into one running Wayland instead. Once in that session you should
be able to launch and run some applications, but stability is
likely to not be great and we don’t know how well XWayland will
work by then, so you will also likely having limited mileage with
applications that still rely on X. The goal for the tech preview is
not to create something an end user is likely to find very useful,
rather it is about lowering the barrier for developers and
contributors to get involved and start preparing for the Wayland
future.
The hope is that the preview will help developers to find problems and
stabilize things to the point that a shift to Wayland as the default could
be considered for Fedora 21. Given all that has to happen, though,
and given the developers' intent (as reiterated by Christian) to ensure that
users don't even notice the change, a switch for Fedora 21 may be an
overly ambitious goal. But it's worth a try, and it will be interesting to
see how Wayland holds up if one tries to do real work with it.
The change that many people got worked up over, of course, was the dropping of sendmail from the default
install. The project did decide, after some back-and-forth, to take
sendmail out; those who need it can put it back with a single yum
command. There has been a lot less noise in the wider community about the
decision to drop rsyslog
from the default install as well. Without rsyslog, the classic text
system log in /var/log/messages will be no more; there will also
be no support for the syslog network protocol. Instead, systemd's journal will
be solely responsible for system logging. Once again, anybody who relies
on syslog functionality can have it with a single yum command.
But, doubtless, there will be some complaints from users who are unhappy to
see Fedora taking another step away from traditional Unix practice.
The years-long effort to support ARM as a primary architecture took a big
step forward when the Fedora 19 ARM
release happened on the same day as the x86 release. With the
Fedora 20 release, ARM as a primary architecture should be official.
The user base for Fedora on ARM remains small, but it can be expected to
grow as ARM processors find homes in laptops, servers, and other systems
of interest.
There are, needless to say, numerous other additions beyond the usual
upgrades to the latest versions of various packages. For example, the new GNOME Software
application installer will be present. This tool intends to ease the
task of installing and maintaining applications; it's not clear how many
applications will be managed that way in the F20 release, though. Apache
OpenOffice will be added to the distribution, though nobody seems to
envision it replacing LibreOffice as the default Fedora office suite.
There is a plan to add a snapshot and
rollback facility to facilitate recovery from bad updates. And so on.
Interestingly, one feature that appears to have fallen off the list
entirely is the proposed shift to Btrfs as the default filesystem. The new snapshot
feature is, instead, built on LVM. Once upon a time (around Fedora 17)
switching to Btrfs was an explicit release goal. Various difficulties with
the filesystem, the departure of one of
the key developers from Red Hat, and installer difficulties all seem to have
pushed Btrfs off the radar for now; indeed, a
recent discussion suggests that openSUSE will get there first.
Fedora's "Foundations"
notwithstanding, being the first to ship every shiny new feature is not
necessarily the best way to run a distribution, especially if, as some
people still feel about Btrfs, a feature is not yet ready for production
use. Even without Btrfs, Fedora 20 will clearly contain a large
amount of new and interesting software. Needless to say, the quality of
that release will be improved if more people download the alpha release,
give it a try, and report any bugs that they find.
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