Fedora Project makes Fedora 24 available

Fedora Project released Fedora 24 on Tuesday. The Red Hat sponsored Linux distro ships with Gnome 3.20 and includes a host of under-the-hood improvements. The compiler has been updated to GNU Compiler Collection 6.

Fedora 24 had to be delayed four times for last-minute bug fixes. The distro was supposed to appear on May 17, but the OS was released on Tuesday. The different versions of the Linux OS include new functionality. For example, Fedora 24 Workstation, the versions for laptops and desktops, includes Gnome 3.20. The software does not yet have Wayland by default, but work has been done on the X replacement, and Fedora Project points to the possibility that Fedora 25 will run by default Wayland.

The distro comes with version 2.3 of glibc, which should have a positive impact on performance. Improvements to Posix compliance have also been made and version 6 of the GNU Compiler Collection is available. All base packages are based on GCC 6, which should improve stability.

In addition to Workstation, the Server and Cloud versions of Fedora 24 have been released. Server comes with packages and tools like FreeIPA 4.3 for use with servers and Cloud is a minimized version for cloud applications. The Cloud version comes with the OpenShift Origin package, among other things. This is a platform-as-a-server based on the Kubernetes container platform for apps.

In addition, there are Fedora Spins for users who want to try other desktop environments. These versions include KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, Mate-Compiz, and Cinnamon. Another alternative Fedora version is Labs, with software aimed at specific applications such as games and robotics. Finally, there is a version for ARM socs. The versions of Fedora 24 are available from the download section of the project.

Fedora is backed by Red Hat and serves as the foundation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.