Fedora 22 talking points

DISCUSSION DRAFT
This is a draft only for discussion. This is not a final set of talking points, nor are all of the features listed here complete at the time of this draft. Please do a reality check before using these talking points as anything other than a discussion draft!

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 21 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 22 puts us back on track for six-month releases. The project is moving full steam ahead on the three editions (Cloud, Server, and Workstation), as well as continual improvements to the shared packages that make up the Fedora distribution.

Fedora-Wide Changes and Improvements

[Let's include shared changes and improvements here that are visible or have an impact on the day-to-day use of Fedora. A new kernel isn't that exiting to most users, but improvements - like "Acme Wi-Fi cards now work!" is.] For reference - ChangeSet

Fedora Cloud

• Vagrant images. Vagrant is a very popular system for software developers which provides a consistent, repeatable work and deployment environment. While Fedora has long been usable with Vagrant, for the first time, we're shipping official Fedora base boxes as part of the F22 release, for both the minimal Fedora Cloud Base and Fedora Atomic.
• Fedora Dockerfiles' TODO write up something short and punchy https://github.com/fedora-cloud/Fedora-Dockerfiles
• Fedora 22 Docker Image TODO

Fedora Cloud Atomic Host

FIX: can we make these a little more explanatory for people for whom this might be the first they're hearing of Atomic?

• A bare metal installation ISO is now available
• The core Cockpit daemon is now available as a container, instead of part of the base tree
• The "atomic" command is replaced by a new project: https://github.com/projectatomic/atomic
• iSCSI is now supported
• New versions of the core ostree tool for updates improves speed, GPG signature handling, and more.
• The user ids have changed from Fedora 21, and are now compatible with downstreams. This allows "rebasing" between different OS streams.

Fedora Server

• Database Server Role. The Fedora Server Product will provide a standard deployment mechanism for a Linux Database Server (powered by the postgresql project).
  • The Fedora Server Product will be shipped with a role-deployment mechanism. One such role will be to act as a primary or replica Database Server for the Linux machines in the network.
  • This will be implemented by taking advantage of the postgresql project, packaging it up within the Server Role Framework and enabling it to be deployed through the mechanisms described in the Framework for Server Role Deployment Change Proposal.
• Default to XFS filesystem. The default file system type for Fedora Server installs will be XFS running atop LVM for all partitions except /boot. The /boot partition will remain a non-LVM, ext4 partition due to technological limitations of the bootloader.
• Cockpit will be compatible between OS releases
  • Cockpit is a server manager that makes it easy to administer your GNU/Linux servers via a web browser.
  • Easy to use. Cockpit is perfect for new sysadmins, allowing them to easily perform simple tasks such as storage administration, inspecting journals and starting and stopping services.
  • No interference. Jumping between the terminal and the web tool is no problem. A service started via Cockpit can be stopped via the terminal. Likewise, if an error occurs in the terminal, it can be seen in the Cockpit journal interface.
  • Multi-server. You can monitor and administer several servers at the same time.
• Fedora Server supports Docker containers on the armv7hl architecture
  • Users of Fedora Server on armv7hl can create and manage their own Docker containers.
  • Note: Docker support on armv7hl does not work with the central Docker registry.
• DNF as the default package manager. DNF was forked from Yum in January 2012 and available for experimenting in fedora since release 18. The project is now fully capable of replacing Yum in new Fedora installations. This entails:
  • letting system administrators (including users who routinely manage their packages using the legacy Yum) perform all common packaging operations using DNF, with no or minimal and documented change to the command syntax, apart from replacing the command name. (done)
  • providing implementation of Anaconda backend so system can be bootstrapped completely without using legacy Yum. (done)
  • providing alternative to all Yum plugins from yum-utils (ongoing)
  • providing alternative to all release engineering tools (repoquery, bodhi etc.) from yum-utils (ongoing)
  • being ready/having the capacity to help out users with migration of their custom legacy plugins and extensions to DNF. The solid API documentation we provide is of great advantage here. (ongoing)
• Ipsilon. Ipsilon is a server and a toolkit to configure Apache-based Service Providers. The server is a pluggable selfcontained mod_wsgi application that provides federated SSO to web applications. User authentication is always performed against a separate Identity Management system (for example a FreeIPA server), and communication with application is done using a federation protocol like SAML, OpenID, etc..

Fedora Workstation

• Better notifications. Thanks both to work done in GNOME 3.16 and other projects like the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT), notifications keep you better informed, but interfere less with your work. They now appear anchored to the center of the top bar, and no longer cover up the bottom of the screen where you are often reading a terminal or browser. An unobtrusive marker appears in the calendar to let you know you have unread notifications. If ABRT detects a serious bug, a friendly notification appears and allows you to report the bug information, but doesn't overload you with details. And if you're a serious Terminal user, longer background jobs now notify you when they're done, so you can get on with other work and pick up the results when you're ready.

• Refined themes. The GNOME Shell and other themes and design are refined and improved. Now you can more easily identify information on the screen, adjust window size and placement, and navigate your files and folders. Improved bridging between desktop environment themes allows apps from other environments like KDE to look and feel more like native apps as they're updated to take advantage of this feature. Standard scrollbars have been replaced by a minimal, overlaid indicator, while a scrollbar trough is shown when needed. This create a cleaner, less distracting view which helps you focus on window content. These "overlay scrollbars" are also better suited to mouse scroll wheels and touchpad scrolling.

• Application improvements
  • Software. The Software app has more and better data than ever before, and makes it easy for you to find a wide variety of useful free software. It also makes keeping your system up to date a snap. The Software app also can install all sorts of extras such as fonts or media helpers.
  • Files. The updated layout in Files gives a better view of your files and folders, and a new view popover makes it easy to change the zoom level and sort order from a single place. You can also now move files and folders to the trash intuitively using the Delete key, rather than the Ctrl+Delete keyboard combination.
  • Image Viewer.. The Image Viewer has been redesigned to reduce the amount of window chrome and give more space to images.
  • Boxes. The user interface for Boxes, the application for virtual and remote machines, has a large number of improvements, including new preferences dialogs, a revamped box creation assistant, a feature to send keyboard shortcuts to a box, and display scaling by default.
  • Vagrant. Developers will appreciate the addition of software development environment software Vagrant into Fedora — it'll work using our included virtualization technology, with no need to install third-party virtualization (like VirtualBox). Use this to work on top of the Cloud images mentioned above, or launch your own Vagrant boxes.

Spins

Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop

• Plasma 5 - Plasma 5 is a new major version of KDE's workspaces. It has a new theme called Breeze, which has cleaner visuals and better readability, improves certain work-flows and provides overal more consistent and polished interface. Changes under the hood include switch to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 and migration to fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack based on OpenGL(ES). Screenshot running Fedora 22 Beta.