Fedora 29 talking points

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 29 release. For information on how these talking points were chosen, see Talking Points SOP. They are intended to help Ambassadors quickly present an overview of highlighted features when talking about the release, and to help drive content for the release, etc.

The talking points are based in part on the Change Set for this release.

Overall Release Story

Fedora 29 Beta will release on 2018-09-25. Final release is planned for either 2018-10-23 or 2018-10-30 according to the the schedule, but may slip if the release isn't ready for our users.

Fedora-Wide Changes and Improvements

• Modularity: now available on all Editions and variants
• Grub: single-OS installations hide the GRUB menu
• Cloud provider images: will be updated on a regular cadence

Architectures

• ppc64: dropped as an alternative architecture
• FPGA: added initial support for FPGAs using open source, vendor-agnostic tools
• i686: packages are now built with SSE2 support

Changes to talk about for regular users

• Atomic Workstation: renamed to Fedora Silverblue
• Festival: upgraded to version 2.5

Changes affecting security

• NSS: loads p11-kit modules by default
• GnuTLS: enables TLS 1.3 by default

Changes to talk about for developers

• GNU C library: upgraded to version 2.28.
• Perl: upgraded to version 5.28
• Python: upgraded to version 3.7, but you can still use any other version with tox and friends
• GoLang: upgraded to version 1.11
• Ruby on Rails: upgraded to version 5.2.

Fedora Server

• MySQL: upgraded to version 8
• dstat: merged into the pcp-system-tools package
• Ansible: defaults to Python 3

Fedora Workstation

GNOME 3.30

Fedora 29 features GNOME 3.30 as the default desktop environment. GNOME 3.30 includes a number of enhancements to the core applications, including performance improvements in GJS (this should improve GNOME Shell as well as other GJS-based applications).

For more information about all the new features and enhancements see GNOME 3.30's release announcement and release notes.

Automatic updates

GNOME Software supports automatic updates for Flatpak.

Remote Desktop

GNOME Boxes supports connecting to remote Windows machines using RDP.

Reduced Memory Utilisation

Initial improvements to the memory usage of GNOME on reduced memory devices, such as the Raspberry Pi and other Arm SBCs (Single Board Computers) as a result of the GNOME performance hackfest.

Fedora ARM (aarch64 and ARMv7)

• ZRAM: now supported on ARMv7 and aarch64 pre-generated images
• FreeIPA integration:
  • Automatically set up Kerberos keytab for Cockpit web server, so that single-sign on works without Cockpit login page
  • Cockpit's web server automatically gets and uses an IPA-generated SSL certificate
  • Domain admins can administer the local machine with Cockpit
  • Respect centrally managed SSH known_hosts list
• On-demand installation of additional functionality such as NFS client support, realmd, PCP, VDO, or dnf-automatic.
• Networking: Add UI for firewalld
• Machines: Configure vCPUs, storage devices, and network interfaces
• Storage: Add support for LUKSv2 encrypted devices and enrolling to a Clevis/Tang server

Spins

Xfce

• Upgraded to version 4.13

Upgrading to the Latest Release

To learn how to upgrade to the latest release from a recent Fedora release using DNF, see here.

All Changes

Fedora 29 Accepted System Wide Changes Proposals

These changes have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 28 Release as System Wide Changes.

Fedora 29 Accepted Self Contained Changes Proposals

These changes have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 28 Release as Self Contained Changes.

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