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The Fedora Project announced today the release and general availability of the beta version of the upcoming Fedora 33 distribution, giving the community an early taste of the new features and improvements.
Fedora 33 has been in development for the past several months, and now a beta version is ready for public testing so we can finally get a taste of the new features and improvements included in the upcoming release, which is expected later this year.
The biggest change in Fedora 33 is the fact that Btrfs is now used as default file system for all the official spins, including Fedora Workstation (GNOME), Fedora KDE, Fedora Xfce, Fedora LXQt, Fedora MATE-Compiz, Fedora Cinnamon, Fedora LXDE, and Fedora SoaS (Sugar on a Stick).
Fedora Linux has been using the EXT filesystems by default since day one, but now they decided to give Btrfs a chance starting with version 33. Btrfs is known for offering some great features compared to EXT, including copy-on-write, transparent compression, checksums, pooling, and snapshots.
Btrfs is also known to span over multiple hard drives, which means that it supports 16 times more drive space than EXT4, which is currently being used as default file system by numerous GNU/Linux distributions. However, Fedora 33 will be shipping with a basic set of features for its Btrfs implementation.
“Btrfs offers some really compelling features for users, including transparent compression and copy-on-write. For Fedora 33, we’re only defaulting to the basic features of Btrfs,” said Fedora Project leader Matthew Miller.
Also new in the Fedora 33 Beta release is the latest and greatest GNOME 3.38 desktop environment, used by default in the Fedora Workstation edition, which also brings better thermal management and peak performance for Intel CPUs and animated backgrounds by default.
Among other noteworthy changes, the beta version of the Fedora 33 KDE spin now comes with earlyOOM enabled by default to improve system responsiveness on low-end machines, GNU nano is now used as default CLI text editor, and Linux kernel 5.8 is used by default on all official spins.
With this release, the Fedora Project introduces a new spin called Fedora IoT, which is designed speficically to be deployed on IoT (Internet of Things) devices. It uses the OSTree upgrade system for atomic upgrades and includes the PARSEC (Platform AbstRaction for SECurity) open-source technology for hardware security.
Fedora 33 Beta is available for download right now from the official website. If you’re willing to give it a try, please keep in mind that this is still a pre-release version, so don’t install it on a production system. The final release is expected sometime at the end of October or in early November 2020.
Last updated 4 years ago
