The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 26 Beta, the next big step on our journey to the exciting Fedora 26 release in July.

Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site:

Or, check out one of our popular variants, including KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other desktop environments, as well as images for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3:

Looking for Fedora Cloud Base? This is replaced by Atomic as a Fedora Edition for the container use case, but we still produce it for those of you who want to build up your own cloud-computing environment in a more traditional way — see Alternative Downloads below.

Fedora’s journey is not simply about updating one operating system with the latest and greatest packages. It’s also about innovation for the many different platforms represented in the Fedora Project: Workstation, Server, Atomic, and the various Spins. Coordinating the efforts across the many working groups is no small task, and serves as a testament to the talent and professionalism found within the Fedora community.

As we move into this Beta phase of the Fedora 26 release cycle, what can users expect?

Fedora-Wide Changes

Fedora, always in the path of innovation, will ship with the latest version of the GNU Compiler Collection, also known as GCC, bringing the latest language features and optimizations to users and to the software we build. Also the Go Language is updated to the latest version, 1.8, which includes 32-bits MIPS support and speed

improvements.

One of the most important changes is the addition of “blivet-gui” to the installer. This provides a “building-blocks” style partitioning GUI for sysadmins and enthusiast users who are familiar with the details of storage systems.

Also, we’ve made and included many improvements in security, improving user experience and reducing the risks of the digital life.

Fedora Editions

The Workstation edition of Fedora 26 Beta features GNOME 3.24, which includes important changes like Night Light, which changes the color temperature of the display based on time of day. It also includes the latest update of LibreOffice.

Our Atomic Host Edition also has many improvements, including more options to run containers, the latest version of the docker container platform, the cockpit manager and the atomic CLI, improving the way containers are managed, making being a sysadmin easier.

Spins and Labs

The Fedora Project is proud to announce two new versions: The LXQt Spin, a lightweight desktop supporting the latest version of the Qt libraries; and the Python Classroom Lab, a new version focused in the teaching and learning of the Python programming language. And, in the Cinnamon Spin, the desktop is updated to the latest version.

Alternative Architectures and Other Downloads

We are also simultaneously releasing 64-bit F26 Beta for ARM (AArch64), Power (both little and big endian) and s390x architectures. You’ll also find minimal network installers and the Fedora 26 Beta Cloud Base image here:

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 26 is expected in July. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Every bug you find and report doesn’t just help you, it improves the experience of millions of Fedora users worldwide! Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can, and your feedback improves not only Fedora, but Linux and Free software as a whole.

Issues and Details

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in #fedora-qa on Freenode. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F26 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug report.

More information

For more detailed information about what’s new on Fedora 26 Beta Release, you can consult our Talking Points and the F26 Change Set. They contain more technical information about the new packages and improvements shipped with this release.