Developers Release Fedora 23

The RedHat sponsored Fedora Project has released Fedora 23. With the new release, Gnome 3.18 is the default desktop environment and Linux kernel 4.2 is under the hood. In addition, Fedora includes a new firmware update system.

The latter means that Fedora’s update software automatically downloads and installs firmware updates as hardware builders release them and put them on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service. The process is then comparable to ‘normal’ software, which receives its updates from software sources or repositories.

In addition to the Workstation version of the operating system, there are also a new Fedora Server and a Fedora Cloud edition. The main changes over Fedora 22 are security improvements, such as the inability to run software made with ssl3 and rc4. All packages are now compiled with aslr by default. Python 3 and Mono 4 are now also included as standard with Workstation. In addition, the operating system now has support for Unicode 8.

Also included as standard is xdg-app, a project by Gnome to enable cross-distribution sandboxed applications. It should then be easier for third parties to create an application that works on different distros, with the application having as little access to the host operating system as possible. It is still experimental and requires Wayland as a display server.

The minimum system requirements for a standard installation are a 1GHz processor, 1GB ram and 10GB hard disk space, although there is a sleeve to adjust with a minimal installation, which also means less than 768MB ram. In addition to Gnome 3.18, various Fedora spins can be used, such as KDE, Cinnamon, and several other desktop environments.

Users who want to upgrade from Fedora 22 to 23 should use the new package management software DNF instead of Yum. Also included as standard software packages are Firefox 41.0.1, Evolution 3.18.1 and LibreOffice 5. With Gnome 3.18 there is Google Drive integration as standard and there is a new Calendar application.