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The Fedora Project released today the Fedora 33 operating system as the latest and greatest release of their RPM-based, community maintained GNU/Linux distribution for the masses.
Continuing the six-month release cycle, Fedora 33 is here exactly six months after the Fedora 32 release to bring you all the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, as well as some exciting new features that might turn some heads.
Powered by the Linux 5.8 kernel series, Fedora 33 is the first release to use Btrfs as default file system for all the official spins. Btrfs comes with some great features compared to the EXT file system, including copy-on-write, snapshots, transparent compression, checksums, pooling, and the ability to span over multiple hard drives.
However, since Fedora 33 is the first release to switch to Btrfs by default, only some basic features were enabled in the file system, probably to make sure everyone has a stable and safe experience. Future Fedora Linux releases will enable more Btrfs features if they’re requested by the community.
Fedora 33 is also the first release to ship with a new edition, Fedora IoT, designed and optimized for edge devices on a wide range of hardware platforms. Fedora IoT uses the the Platform AbstRaction for SECurity (PARSEC) for security and cryptographic services, and offers safe updates and rollbacks using the OSTree technology.
Among other major changes, the earlyOOM feature was enabled by default for the KDE Plasma spin to improve system responsiveness on low-memory machines, switches to GNU nano as default command-line editor, and ships with thermald by default in Fedora Workstation for better thermal management and peak performance on Intel processors.
Moreover, Fedora 33 adds support for the Network Time Security (NTS) authentication mechanism in the NTP client/server and installer, reimplements the fedora-repos-modular package, makes DXVK the default wined3d backend on Vulkan capable hardware, and enables systemd-resolved by default.
Another interesting feature is swap-on-zram, which is created during start up to eliminate the use of a swap partitions by default. Other than that, Fedora Workstation now uses animated backgrounds by default, which are actually time-of-day slideshows with hue changes.
Software-wise, Fedora 33 comes with all the latest desktop environments and applications. The Fedora Workstation edition is using the GNOME 3.38.1 desktop, while the Fedora KDE Plasma spin uses KDE Plasma 5.19.5, Fedora Xfce uses Xfce 4.14, Fedora Cinnamon uses Cinnamon 4.6.7, Fedora MATE uses MATE 1.24.1, and Fedora LXQt uses LXQt 0.15.0.
Under the hood, Fedora 33 adds updated versions of various core packages like Perl, Python, Ruby, and .NET Core on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, drops support for Python 2.6 and Python 3.4, and replaces the mod_php httpd module with php-fpm, which proves to be more performant and secure.
Among the GNU/Linux technologies and components found in this release, there’s RPM 4.16, GNU C Library 2.32, GNU Make 4.3, LLVM 11, GNU Binutils 2.34, GHC 8.8, Python 3.9, Boost 1.73, Perl 5.32, Node.js 14.x, Golang 1.15, OpenJDK 11, Erlang 23, IBus 1.5.23, and Ruby on Rails 6.0.
Fedora 33 is available in multiple editions and flavors, including the main spins with the GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXDE, LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, and SoaS desktops, the Fedora Labs spins, as well as the Server and IoT editions. You can download them all right now using the links below.
Last updated 2 years ago
