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Workstation and cloud improvements in Fedora 24

Fedora 24 was released on June 21, incorporating updates to a number of core system components, development tools, and new initiatives within the distribution project. The workstation release is available for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 systems and for 32-bit ARM, the server release is provided for 64-bit x86 and 32-bit ARM machines, and the cloud release includes images for Amazon EC2, for Vagrant, and Qcow2 (QEMU) images tailored for OpenStack. In addition, Fedora 24 is the first Fedora release to include simultaneously published images for the distribution's secondary architectures (PowerPC, s390x, and AArch64) for the server and cloud images.

First among the updates in this release are the basic building blocks of any distribution release. Fedora 24 ships with kernel 4.5, glibc 2.23, and GCC 6. Notably, the GCC upgrade also meant a mass rebuild of all Fedora packages with the new compiler. GCC 6 incorporated many runtime improvements for the AArch64 and PowerPC architectures; x86 users may not notice many such differences, but developers will likely be pleased to have access to newer GCC compilation options. Wayland support is provided as an option (and includes several new features, like kinetic scrolling and drag-and-drop), but this release still uses X.org as its default display server.

User-visible changes

Fedora provides GNOME 3.20 as its default desktop environment. That release adds a handful of new user-visible features, such as a window overlay that lists the available keyboard shortcuts, a per-application privacy control to restrict access to geolocation information, and an updated version of the Cantarell UI font. In addition, GTK+ theming has been enhanced, with almost all widgets supporting CSS animation, support for CSS selectors, and greatly improved documentation.

In addition to using GNOME as its desktop environment, of course, Fedora also uses GNOME applications for many of its defaults. Perhaps the most prominent change on that front is GNOME Software, which now supports user "star" ratings on applications, and which can also now perform full OS release upgrades. The GNOME Web browser now supports session restoration, GNOME Maps supports editing OpenStreetMap data, and the GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) supports the creation of Flatpak (previously known as xdg-app) software packages. Even though Flatpak is not in use for any current Fedora packages, GNOME Software is also now able to keep track of installed Flatpak packages alongside traditional RPMs.

Although not a GNOME project, LibreOffice 5.1 is also included, and that release now uses GTK+3 for its interface. Thus, LibreOffice should now fit in better visually with the rest of the GNOME desktop environment. Speaking of look-and-feel matching, Fedora is now shipping a Qt theme called QGnomePlatform that will automatically pick up changes made to the GNOME and GTK+ UI settings.

At a lower level, the new Fedora release continues the distribution's "System Python" effort to split out the Python subpackages required by various system tools and provide those subpackages as a separate Python library of minimal size. That effort came up in a Python Language Summit talk that we covered in the June 15 edition.

There have also been several modifications to Fedora's usage of systemd. First, the distribution's package-installation macros now make use of systemd file triggers. This allows a package-updating session to wait and reload systemd only once, after all of the requested updates have been installed, rather than reloading systemd after every package update. The distribution's previous systemd package has now also been split into two parts; systemd-container includes the systemd services required to run in containers and virtual machines, while systemd-udev includes the systemd components needed for running Fedora on "bare metal." The split should enable container and virtual machine users to get by with a noticeably lighter systemd installation.

For developers and administrators

For developers, Fedora 24 includes a long list of updated language runtimes and libraries, including Mono 4.2, Go 1.6, Ruby 2.3, Node.js 5.10, Python 3.5, TeX Live 2015, and Erlang 18. Of those offerings, the Mono, Go, Ruby, and Python packages represent the latest point release from each project. The Erlang and TeX Live packages are not quite up-to-date—TeX Live 2016 was released on June 5, while Erlang 19 was released on June 22, after the Fedora release. The Node.js release is significantly older; the latest minor upstream release (6.2) came out in May, while Fedora is a full major version number behind.

This version gap is a known problem, one that is particularly concerning since Node.js 5.x will only be supported upstream for a few more months, while the 6.x series introduces numerous ABI breaks. In May, we reported that the distribution was considering a number of possible solutions, including regressing to Node.js 4.x. In the end, the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) decided to move ahead with 5.x, since the 5.x series is already staged for Fedora 25 and the cost of backporting Node.js packages was seen as high.

On the server side, the big addition in this release is version 4.3 of Red Hat's FreeIPA identity-and-authentication server. FreeIPA bundles together support for an array of authentication services, from Kerberos and LDAP to the management of TLS certificates and domain names.

The Fedora cloud images include the latest release of OpenShift Origin, Red Hat's Kubernetes-based container-management platform. For those Fedora cloud users who prefer to build their own images, a more significant change in this release is that the Fedora Docker-image build service has now been reworked to provide layering support. That will enable users to define custom Fedora Docker images as a set of application layers applied on top of the Fedora base layer, thus making it easier to create and deploy customized Docker images.

Fedora Atomic Host images are also provided with the new release. Atomic Host provides an immutable OS image on which containers can be run. In Fedora 24, there is a new "developer mode" available for Atomic; it allows users to log in to the Atomic Host system and experiment with the system. This is in contrast to Atomic Host's normal production mode, which is configured to contact (for example) an OpenStack metadata service during the boot process.

Finally, Fedora 24 marks the debut of a new "spin" (Fedora's term for a specialized build of the workstation environment). Some of the most popular spins provide alternate desktop environments (such as KDE Plasma or Xfce), but there have been a number of topical spins over the years as well. The Fedora 24 release is the first to include the Astronomy Spin, which bundles in a set a software tools and databases for amateur and professional astronomy.

On the whole, the new Fedora release continues the distribution's tradition of steady progress. While some might wonder at decisions like the continued use of X.org rather than Wayland, a closer look reveals how much progress each release makes, from the work to split out a "system python" to the multiple improvements for users deploying Fedora on cloud services.

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