Innovative New Linux Desktops and other Changes in Fedora 30

Fedora 30 was released on April 30. The Fedora Wiki contains a complete list of the changes that were accepted for inclusion in this release. These changes include two new desktop environments, other new features, and bug fixes. Some older packages have been deprecated or completely removed.

As you can see in my previous post, I have already upgraded all of my physical hosts and I have created a new VM for Fedora 30. All of these hosts are working very well and I have not had any problems so far.

Fedora 30 and my books

Fedora 30 should make no difference in any of the experiments in my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Apress, 2018. That book was written using Fedora 28 but everything should also work just fine with Fedora 29 and 30.

I am also working on two new books, the titles of which I cannot yet divulge. The experiments in these two books are being tested to ensure that they work on Fedora 29 and 30. These books should be available late this year but I will keep you informed with future posts here on this site.

The changes

I have listed some of what I consider the more interesting changes along with a short description of each. Much of this information is distilled directly from the Wiki page but I have not included all of the changes listed on that wiki page.

New desktop environments

DeepinDE

Add the Deepin Desktop Environment. Deepin is a Chinese Linux distribution and DeepinDE is its desktop. The DeepinDE is based on the Qt 5 toolkit so can be easily installed on other distributions. It is intended to be simple and easy for new users.

Pantheon Desktop

Another new desktop for Fedora, the Pantheon desktop environment is the minimalist Desktop Environment that powers elementaryOS. It builds on GNOME technologies, but utilizes components that were written from scratch in vala, using the GTK+3 toolkit.

Other changes

Bash 5.0

Upgrade bash to 5.0 release. This release fixes several outstanding bugs in bash-4.4 and introduces several new features. The new features include some new Bash environment variables and improved history command that can delete ranges of history.

Boot Loader

Make BootLoaderSpec-style configuration files the default. This change enables the use of per-boot-entry configuration files, similar to those described in Boot Loader Specification (BLS), to populate the bootloader’s menu entries.

dbus-broker

Make dbus-broker the default DBus implementation. Enable dbus-broker.service to use dbus-broker as system and session message bus backend. DBUS provides communications that allow things like plug and play to work by distributing event notifications to applications and kernel level tools.

Boost 1.69 upgrade

This change brings Boost 1.69 to Fedora. Boost is a set of free, peer-reviewed, portable C++ source libraries This will mean Fedora ships with a recent upstream Boost release.

Flicker Free Boot

Make Fedora Workstation boot graphically smooth, without the display briefly turning off and without any abrupt graphical transitions.

FreeIPA Python 2 Removal

No it is not free beer! FreeIPA 4.8 will require Python 3.6+ and therefore no longer provide Python 2 packages on Fedora 30.

libcrypt

Fully remove deprecated and unsafe functions from libcrypt. This change is about removing binary support for deprecated and unsafe functions and bumping libcrypt.so to libcrypt.so.2.

GCC9

Switch GCC in Fedora 30 to 9.x.y. An attempt will be made to rebuild all packages with it, or optionally rebuild just some packages with it and rebuild everything else in Fedora 31.

GNU C Library

Switch glibc in Fedora 30 to glibc version 2.29.

GNOME 3.32

Update GNOME to the latest upstream release, 3.32.

GnuPG 2

Use GnuPG2 as the default GPG implementation. The /usr/bin/gpg path representing the main GPG implementation will now use GnuPG 2 instead of GnuPG 1.

Mass Python 2 Package

(Sub-)packages only providing python2 importable modules without additional functionality will be removed from Fedora unless some other package(s) depends on them.

Obsolete Scriptlets

Remove scriptlets which are not needed anymore (ldconfig, gtk-update-icon-cache, etc.).

Locale settings

When logging in over ssh or another mechanism, locale settings are forwarded. If the destination does not support that locale, C.UTF-8 will be used instead.

Ruby 2.6

Ruby 2.6 is the latest stable version of Ruby. Many new features and improvements are included for the increasingly diverse and expanding demands for Ruby. With this major update from Ruby 2.5 in Fedora 29 to Ruby 2.6 in Fedora 30, Fedora becom

Deprecate /etc/sysconfig/nfs

Deprecate /etc/sysconfig/nfs and only use /etc/nfs.conf to configure NFS daemons.

uEFI for ARMv7

Move to uEFI as the default boot mechanism for ARMv7 devices.

Fish 3.0

Update Fish to 3.0. Fish allows tools like Midnight Commander and other file managers to access filesystems on remote hosts for easy copy and move from one host to another.

Haskell GHC 8.4 and Stackage LTS 12

Update the ghc Haskell compiler version from 8.2.2 to 8.4.4 and Haskell packages to Stackage LTS 12 versions.

LXQt 0.14.0

Update LXQt to 0.14.0.

MongoDB Removal

The Server Side Public Licensev1 (SSPL) under which MongoDB is distributed is not a Free Software License. Therefore, MongoDB has been removed.

java-openjdk JDK12

Update rolling package of java-openjdk to JDK12

krb5 crypto modernization

krb5 will be removing support for DES, 3DES, crc-32, and MD4 entirely; they will not be allowed in session keys or long-term keys. Additionally, RC4 and MD5 will be marked deprecated and dangerous.

PHP 7.3

Update the PHP stack to latest version 7.3.x