Half a year ago we wrote about the release of Fedora 33, and now there is a new version of the distribution. In addition, the developers have prepared and related products, including Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, CoreOS, Fedora IoT Edition. As for platforms, the distribution is suitable for x86_64, Power64, ARM64 (AArch64) and 32-bit ARM chips.
The new version has received quite a few different improvements and additions:
Developers have transferred assemblies from KDE to Wayland, but X11 has now become optional. As of KDE Plasma 5.20, the release managed to achieve a number of issues. For example, screencasting is now effortless, as is inserting the middle mouse button. For NVIDIA drivers, the kwin-wayland-nvidia package is used. Accordingly, the XWayland component can be used on systems with proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Introduced headless mode of operation, which makes it possible to run desktop elements on remote systems, accessing them via VNC or RDP.
Fedora Workstation desktop is now updated to GNOME 40 release and GTK 4 library. For GNOME, virtual desktops are oriented horizontally in overview mode. Each desktop is shown with windows open. They are dynamically panned and scaled when interacting with the user. According to the developer, the transition between the list of programs and virtual desktops is now seamless.
A variant with the i3 window manager has been added, in which windows on the desktop are placed in a tiled mode.
Developers have also begun building KDE desktop images for systems based on the AArch64 architecture, in addition to builds for GNOME and Xfce desktops, and images for server systems.
The PipeWire server works with audio streams instead of PulseAudio and JACK. It was chosen because it makes it possible to professionally process sound in a conventional edition, without fragmentation. In addition, the audio infrastructure can be easily unified for different applications.
You can process sound professionally in JACK, but for interaction between PulseAudio and JACK, we had to add a layer that works through PipeWire. It made it possible to save the work of all active PulseAudio and JACK clients, as well as applications delivered in the Flatpak format.
