Fedora 28 talking points

These are the Talking Points for the Fedora 28 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

Releases may slip if Fedora 28 isn't ready for our users, but the schedule calls for a beta release at the end of March and a final release at the beginning of May.

Fedora-Wide Changes and Improvements

• Modular updates repository: new in Fedora 28, a set of repositories will provide software and updates with alternative versions from those shipped in the default release.
• VirtualBox integration: VirtualBox guest drivers and tools are now included.

Changes affecting security

• curl: now uses libssh for SCP and SFTP protocols, adding support for GSS-API authentication and removing outdated cryptographic algorithms.
• Strong cryptographic settings: default security configuration removes weaker cryptographic settings.

Changes to talk about for developers

• GCC: upgraded to version 8.
• GoLang: upgraded to version 1.10.
• PHP: upgraded to version 7.2.
• Ruby: upgraded to version 2.5.

Fedora Server

• Modularity: Fedora 28 Server Edition will deliver Fedora Modularity, adding support for alternative update streams for popular software such as Node.js and Golang.
• AArch64: AArch64 is now a primary architecture for Fedora Server releases.

Fedora Workstation

Improved battery life

Battery Life on laptops running Fedora Workstation is improved with various hardware power-saving features now enabled by default. These improvements include: a new default SATA Link Power Management policy on all Intel mobile chipsets. This policy sets the SATA link to a disk to into low-power mode when idle, saving approximately 1.0 - 1.5 watts of power on an idle laptop. Additionally, the Intel HDA codec power saving is enabled by default (with a 1 second timeout), saving approximately 0.4 watts of power on an idle laptop. Finally, USB autosuspend for USB Bluetooth receivers is enabled by default, saving approximately 0.4 watts of power on an idle laptop.

GNOME 3.28

Fedora 28 Workstation features GNOME 3.28 as the default desktop environment. GNOME 3.28 includes a wide range of enhancements, including: updates to Files (nautilus), Contacts, Calendar, Clocks and the on-screen keyboard. Additionally, the new application Usage is added as a Technology Preview to “make it easy to diagnose and resolve performance and capacity issues”

GNOME 3.28 provides updated versions of many of the GNOME default applications. The ability to “star” items is added to both the Files and the Contacts applications. This allows the user to star an item — be it a file, folder, or a contact — for quick access later. Calendar now provides a neater month view, and weather updates displayed alongside your appointments.

For more information about all the new features and enhancements see GNOME 3.28's release announcement and release notes.

Thunderbolt support

The use of Thunderbolt 3 peripherals is now supported in Fedora 28. Thunderbolt™ is the brand name of a hardware interface developed by Intel® that allows the connection of external peripherals to a computer.

Fedora 28 ships with both boltd -- the system daemon for securely connecting Thunderbolt devices -- and changes to GNOME shell to connect these devices. Newly connected Thunderbolt devices are automatically enrolled by GNOME shell via the daemon if the current user is a system administrator and the session is unlocked. Subsequent connections of the same device will automatically authorize the device.

Improved emoji support

The Noto Color Emoji font is now the default for displaying Emoji on Fedora Workstation. This provides support for Unicode 10.0 emoji, including T-Rex (🦖), Hedgehog (🦔), Broccoli (🥦), and Curling Stone (🥌).

GNOME Photos

Fedora Workstation 28 introduces GNOME Photos as the default photo management application, replacing Shotwell. Photos is a simple application for viewing, browsing and organizing your photo library. In addition to photo organization, Photos also provides basic image editing capabilities, including the ability to add quick photographic filters over your images.

More information about the GNOME Photos application is available on the project's page on gnome.org

VirtualBox Guest Additions now default

VirtualBox Guest Additions and Guest Drivers are now shipped in the default Fedora Workstation installation. Consequently, any installation of Fedora Workstation as a guest on VirtualBox will have the Guest Additions features working out-of-the-box. Guest Additions add extra useful functionality to VirtualBox guests, including: automatic desktop resizing based on the window-size of the virtual machine, seamless mode (showing only windows from the guest), folder sharing, and copy/paste between host and guest.

Fedora ARM (aarch64 and ARMv7)

Raspberry Pi 3+ support

The newly released Raspberry Pi 3+ is supported on both ARMv7 and aarch64 with a similar feature set to that of the original Raspberry Pi 3.

Expanded support for aarch64 Single Board Computers

The support for aarch64 Single Board Computers was introduced in Fedora 27, the supported devices has been expanded and a lot of small improvements and bug reports to make the experience smoother.

Labs

Design Suite

• Blender 2.79b and its add-ons are missing in this beta release due to a bug related to compiler GCC 8.0. The fix are under way and expected for the final release.
• Both Gnome ToDo and Books, originally introduced in Fedora 27 Design Suite are updated to 3.28.
• Inheriting features from Workstation, Gnome Photo is the default image viewer replacing Shotwell
• New release for Hugin, a panoramic photo stitcher, 2018.0.0

Upgrading to the Latest Release

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

All Changes

Fedora 28 Accepted System Wide Changes Proposals

These changes have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 28 Release as System Wide Changes.

AArch64 Server Promotion

Promote Aarch64 server technologies to Primary Architecture status. This would include the Server installer, the DVD installer ISOs, the Cloud (qcow2 images) and Docker base images to the same status as other primary Server architectures. This would NOT currently include other components such as Workstation images/installs, any of the various spins, or Fedora Atomic components.

Anaconda modularization

Anaconda installer will be split into several modules that will communicate over DBus using stable API.

Annotated Binaries

This change causes extra information to be stored in binary files compiled by gcc. This information can be used by scripts to check on various features of the file, such as the hardening options used or potential ABI conflicts.

Make authselect default tool instead of authconfig

Replace authconfig with authselect and make authselect a default tool to configure PAM and nsswitch.conf. A compatibility tool will help with transition period from authconfig to authselect.

Binutils version 2.29.1

Rebase the binutils package from version 2.29 to version 2.29.1. This will bring in the bug-fixes from the 2.29.1 point release, but not add any new features.

Deprecate TCP wrappers

TCP wrappers is a simple tool to block incoming connection on application level. This was very useful 20 years ago, when there were no firewalls in Linux. This is not the case for today and connection filtering should be done in network level or completely in application scope if it makes sense. After recent discussions I believe it is time to go for this package, if not completely, than at least as a dependency of modern daemons in system by default.

Add-On Modularity

Beginning in Fedora 28, Fedora will provide a new set of repositories for software and updates with alternative versions from those shipped in the default release.

Fedora 28 Boost 1.66 upgrade

This change brings Boost 1.66.0 to Fedora 28. This will mean F28 ships with a recent upstream Boost release.

GCC8

Switch GCC in Fedora 28 to 8.x.y, rebuild all packages with it, or optionally rebuild just some packages with it and rebuild all packages only in Fedora 29.

GHC 8.2

Update the Haskell GHC compiler from major version 8.0.2 to 8.2.2.

The GNU C Library version 2.27

Switch glibc in Fedora 28 to glibc version 2.27.

Glibc collation update and sync with cldr

Update collation data in glibc to an ISO file from 2015 (in sync with Unicode 8.0.0) and sync collation rules of the locales with CLDR.

Hardening Flags Updates for Fedora 28

This system-wide change covers changes to the hardening flags in Fedora 28.

IBus Unicode Typing

IBus core provides an Emoji dialog which users can type emoji annotations and output the emoji character using IBus (E.g. Typing "football" shows U+26BD). The proposal is the dialog also supports to type Unicode names (E.g. Typing "copyright sign" shows U+00A9).

Switch libidn-using applications to IDNA2008

The proposed change is about deprecating libidn, which supports IDNA2003, and switch all applications using libidn, to libidn2 2.0.0, which supports IDNA2008.

Improved Laptop Battery Life

Improve Fedora (Workstation) Battery Life by enabling various hardware power-saving features by default.

NIS switching to new libnsl to support IPv6

This system-wide change covers the switch of NIS components to the new client side implementation in order to support IPv6, while detaching libnsl and nss_nis packages, previously bundled together with glibc.

NSS Default File Format SQL

Change the NSS library default to use the sqlite based data storage, when applications don't specify their preferred storage file format.

OpenLDAP defaults to use only Shared System Certificates

In order to go forward with adoption of SharedSystemCertificates after this change OpenLDAP clients and server will default to use only the system-wide certificates store.

OpenLDAP without Non-threaded Libraries

OpenLDAP will not ship non-threaded versions of its libraries. Instead, it will link these to their threaded counterparts.

Reduce Initial Setup Redundancy

Currently there is a high level of redundancy between the Anaconda installer and gnome-initial-setup. This change aims to eliminate these redundancies and streamline the initial user experience in Fedora Workstation.

Rename "nobody" user

Use "nobody:nobody" as the names for the kernel overflow UID:GID pair, and retire the old "nfsnobody" name and the old "nobody:nobody" pair with 99:99 numbers.

Replace glibc's libcrypt with libxcrypt

There are plans to remove libcrypt from glibc, so we should have a replacement.

Ruby 2.5

Ruby 2.5 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 2.4 in Fedora 26 to Ruby 2.5 in Fedora 28, Fedora becomes the superior Ruby development platform.

Strong crypto settings

This change is about updating the current system-wide crypto policy to disable legacy and unused cryptographic protocols.

Removal of Sun RPC Interfaces From glibc

This system-wide change covers the removal of interfaces related to Sun RPC from glibc.

Golang 1.10

Rebase of Golang package to upcoming version 1.10 in Fedora 28, 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).

Kerberos in Python modernization

Replace usage of python-krbV and pykerberos with python-gssapi in all Fedora packages to enable their removal from Fedora. rharwood will author all necessary code changes; no new code from maintainers is required.

Switch libcurl to use libssh instead of libssh2

libcurl currently uses libssh2 to implement the SSH layer of SCP and SFTP protocols. After implementing this change, libcurl will use the libssh library instead.

mpfr-4.0.0

Update the MPFR package to version 4.0.0.

time-1.8

A new time tool version 1.8 has changed output format.

Fedora 28 Accepted Self Contained Changes Proposals

These changes have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 28 Release as Self Contained Changes.

Enabling Python Generators

This change enables the ability to choose to use the Python module dependency generator for packages that provide Python Egg/Wheel metadata.

GifLib5

Update the giflib package to the latest giflib-5.x version (currently 5.1.4).

Avoid /usr/bin/python in RPM build

Deprecate, and later disable, running /usr/bin/python (as opposed to /usr/bin/python3 or /usr/bin/python2) during RPM build.

Django 2.0

This change is about upgrading python-django to version 2.0. The latest Django release drops support for Python 2, but a few Django apps packaged in Fedora do not yet support Python 3. A compatibility package will be provided for those.

Erlang 20

Update Erlang/OTP to version 20.

Facter3

This is an update of the Facter package from 2.X to 3.X. It is a self contained changed which will impact puppet directly and potentially any other tools that make use of facter to gather information.

Fontconfig 2.13

Update fontconfig package to the latest version.

MinGW MiniDebugInfo

Analogously to the MiniDebugInfo change for native packages, install minimal debuginfos by default also for MinGW packages.

OpenLDAP: Drop TCP wrappers support

As per [1], TCP wrappers are being deprecated in Fedora. Also, as per [2], upstream discourages its usage in favour of other means of protection (e.g. firewall). After this change OpenLDAP will no longer be affected by TCP wrappers configuration.

Packaging Rust applications/libraries

Add required tools/instructions for packaging applications/libraries written in Rust. Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

Stratis Storage

Add initial support for Stratis, a local storage management solution. This will allow initial testing and user feedback that will guide Stratis's development and stabilization.

Sugar 0.112

Update Sugar to the new upstream 0.112 stable feature release.

Thunderbolt Enablement

Support Thunderbolt 3 peripherals in a secure way hardware out of the box.

VirtualBox Guest Integration

VirtualBox is popular, easy to use virtual-machine software. The purpose of this change is to ship the VirtualBox guest-drivers and -tools by default in the Fedora workstation product.

librealsense2

A new version of librealsense has been released, which does not support older camera versions. Bump librealsense to the new release and add the old library as librealsense1.

PHP 7.2

Update the PHP stack in Fedora to latest version 7.2.x

VA-API 1.0.0

The VA-API components will be updated to 2.x. This will make some VA-API enabled media players to rely on this new version of the API for improved video hardware acceleration.

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