Fedora 31 talking points

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 31 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 31 Beta was released on 2019-09-17. Final release was released on 2019-xx-xx. Releases/31/Schedule

Fedora-Wide Changes and Improvements

• Enable the Linux kernel's net.ipv4.ping_group_range parameter to cover all groups.
• Binary RPMs are currently compressed with xz level 2. Switching to zstd would increase decompression speed significantly.
• Switch glibc in Fedora 31 to glibc version 2.30.

Changes to talk about for regular users

• Stop building i686 kernels, reduce the i686 package to a kernel-headers package that can be used to build 32-bit versions of everything else.
  • No i686 kernel means we would stop producing i686 bootable images as well.
  • i686 (32-bit) users will not be able to upgrade to F30 (unless doing some trickery), and will have to move to another supported arch.
  • If they are running in 64-bit, then there will still be 32-bit "multilib" libraries available, but not 32-bit applications. Users of x86_64 systems can still install i686 "multilib" packages (ie, there for the purposes of running 32-bit software on a 64-bit install) in the same way it used to work before
  • So, if you have a 32-bit install, you should really look at:
    • Can your hardware just run 64-bit, but you haven't moved it to that yet for some reason? Then look at doing so before F30 goes end of life.
    • If your hardware cannot run 64-bit, it might be time to upgrade the hardware. Failing to do that you could look at moving it to another distro that still supports i386.

• Python 2 is reaching end of life, and the current maintainers would like to orphan it.
• In package and command names, "Python" will mean "Python 3".
• Update RPM to the 4.15.0 release.
• LibreOffice 6.3.1

Changes affecting security

• The upstream OpenSSH disabled password logins for root back in 2015. The Fedora should follow to keep security expectation and avoid users surprises with this configuration.

Changes to talk about for developers

• Allow users to optionally use update-alternatives to make /usr/bin/ld point to /usr/bin/lld.
• The version 2.0.x of Sphinx, popular Python documentation generator and framework, is expected to be released in early 2019. It drops support for Python 2. As part of Finalizing Fedora's Switch to Python 3, we update python-sphinx to 2.0.x and we drop python2-sphinx and related packages from Fedora 31 and further.
• Rebase of Golang package to upcoming version 1.13 in Fedora 31, including rebuild of all dependent packages(pre-release version of Go will be used for rebuild, if released version will not be available at the time of the mass rebuild).
• Mono 5.20
• Node.js 12.x
  • Fedora 31 will carry 12.x as the default Node.js interpreter for the system.
  • The 10.x interpreter will remain available as a non-default module stream.
• gawk 5.0.1
• glibc 2.30

Fedora Server

• Cockpit 203

Fedora Workstation

• GNOME 3.34
• Firefox Wayland By Default On Gnome
• Thunderbird Wayland can be used
• GameMode improvements
• Out of box H.264 and AAC support

Fedora ARM (aarch64 and ARMv7)

• Add an AArch64 Xfce Desktop spin disk image to deliverables in Fedora 31.

Spins

KDE Plasma Desktop

• plasma-desktop 5.16

Xfce

• Xfce 4.14
  • Significant work has been completed to migrate the DE to GTK-3 completely.

Deepin

Update the Deepin Desktop Environment to 15.11 in Fedora.

Upgrading to the Latest Release

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

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