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.
- Fedora Dockerfiles' TODO write up something short and punchy https://github.com/fedora-cloud/Fedora-Dockerfiles
- Q: how to talk about Atomic for F22?
Fedora Server
Fedora Workstation
(more to do here... ping stickster if no updates by Tuesday)
- 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.
- Software app. 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 app. Updated layout 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. File deletion has also been improved for - this allows files and folders to be moved to the trash using Delete alone, rather than the Ctrl+Delete keyboard combination.
- Overlay scrollbars. Standard scrollbars have been replaced by a minimal overlaid indicator (a scrollbar trough is shown when needed). This create a cleaner, less distracting view which helps you to focus on window content. They are also better suited to mouse scroll wheels and touchpad scrolling.
- Image Viewer app.. The app has been redesigned to reduce the amount of window chrome and give more space to images.
- Boxes. Boxes, the application for virtual and remote machines, has had a large number of user interface improvements. This includes new preferences dialogs, a revamped box creation assistant, a feature to send keyboard shortcuts to a box, and display scaling by default.
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.