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.**NOPE** looks like this is pushed to F23 due to some communication issues.- 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
- A bare metal installation ISO is now available
- A Vagrant base box for both vagrant-libvirt and vagrant-virtualbox is now available
- The core Cockpit daemon is now available as a container, instead of part of the base tree
- 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
(Note: these are placeholders; Truong Anh Tuan will be filling them in with more information)
- Database Server Role
- Default to XFS filesystem (Q: What does this do for users? Think non-technical, story-based.)
- From Fedora 22 onwards, Cockpit will be compatible between OS releases (Are there other shiny new Cockpit capabilities?)
- Fedora Server supports Docker containers on the armv7hl architecture (How does this work with the x86_64-only docker registry? Is this a server-only thing?)
- DNF as the default package manager (What exciting new things does this provide for Server uses in particular?)
- Ipsilon - new multiple-protocol identity provider service (Again, what does this enable for users and how does it fit into our overall story and vision?)
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.
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.