Fedora Linux 36 Is Here with GNOME 42, Linux Kernel 5.17, and Wayland for NVIDIA Users

Fedora Linux 36

The Fedora Project announced today the release and general availability of Fedora Linux 36 as the latest and greatest version of this free Red Hat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution for the masses.

After six months of development, Fedora Linux 36 is here featuring the latest and greatest GNOME 42 desktop environment for its “Workstation” flagship edition with full support for GTK4 apps, the latest and greatest Linux 5.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support, as well as an updated toolchain with the most recent GNU/Linux technologies and the most recent application releases.

Highlights of Fedora Linux 36 include the enablement of Wayland sessions by default in GDM (GNOME Display Manager) for users with the NVIDIA proprietary driver, Noto Fonts as the default font for most languages to improve consistency in text rendering, and plocate as the default locate implementation for much faster indexing of files.

“If you use NVIDIA’s proprietary graphics driver, your desktop sessions will now default to using the Wayland protocol. This allows you to take advantage of hardware acceleration while using the modern desktop compositor,” said Fedora Project leader Matthew Miller.

It also enables users as administrators by default in the Anaconda graphical installer, adds /var on its own Btrfs subvolume for new Silverblue and Kinoite installations to make it easier to handle snapshots of dynamic data, relocates RPM databases to /var instead of /usr for consistency with other RPM-based distros and Fedora Spins, introduces a cockpit module to make file sharing with Samba and NFS easier, and adds support for unit names in systemd messages to better identify what services are starting or stopping.

Support for OCI/Docker containers in the rpm-ostree stack is also present in the Fedora Linux 36 release, which improves Fedora upgrades when upgrading with module streams enabled and updates the package management system to only install newly recommended packages on upgrades.

Among other noteworthy changes, Fedora Linux 36 adds new requirements for the akmods binary kernel modules in the Silverblue and Kinoite flavors, updates existing default Malayalam fonts, enforces authselect configuration consistency, removes support for legacy network configuration files in NetworkManager by default for new installations, replaces the fbdev drivers with simpledrm and the DRM fbdev emulation layer as another step towards a fbdev-free Fedora Linux system.

Under the hood, we find GCC 12, GNU C Library 2.35, LLVM 14, OpenSSL 3.0, Autoconf 2.71, Ruby 3.1, Rubygem Cucumber 7.1.0, Ruby on Rails 7.0, Golang 1.18, OpenJDK 17, libffi 3.4, OpenLDAP 2.6.1, Ansible 5, Django 4.0, PHP 8.1, PostgreSQL 14, Podman 4.0, MLT 7.4, Stratis 3.0.0, and many of the latest GNU/Linux technologies.

All the Fedora Spins have been updated as well to include the most recent versions of their default desktop environments, such as KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS, Xfce 4.16, LXQt 1.0, Cinnamon 5.2, MATE 1.26, and others. You can get your favorite Fedora Linux 36 Spin right now from here. For more details, check out the full release notes.

You can download Fedora Linux 36 right now from the official website as ISO images or as torrents from Fedora Project’s torrent tracker. Of course, you can also upgrade your Fedora Linux 35 installations via the GNOME Software graphical package manager or the command line. Meanwhile, you can check out our first look video below if you just want to see Fedora Linux 36’s flagship edition in action!

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com