Fedora 22 Beta Release Announcement

The Fedora 22 Beta release has arrived, with a preview of the latest free and open source technology under development. Take a peek inside!

What is the Beta release?

The Beta release contains all the exciting features of Fedora 22's editions in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is meant to be feature complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 22 is expected in May.

We need your help to make Fedora 22 the best release yet, so please take some time to download and try out the Beta and make sure the things that are important to you are working. If you find a bug, please report it – every bug you uncover (and/or help fix!) is a chance to improve the experience for 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 feasible, and your feedback will help improve not only Fedora but Linux and free software on the whole.

Base platform

Faster and better dependency management: yum has been replaced with dnf as the default package manager. dnf has very similar command line options and configuration files compared to yum but also has several major internal changes including using libsolv in coordination with friends from the openSUSE project for faster and better dependency management. dnf-yum provides automatic redirection from yum to dnf in the command line for compatibility. The classic yum command line tool renamed to yum-deprecated as a transitional step for tools still using it.

Fedora 22 Cloud

The Fedora 22 Cloud Edition builds on the work completed during the Fedora 21 cycle, and brings in a number of improvements that make Fedora 22 a superb choice for running Linux in the cloud.

Ready for the Fedora 22 release, we have:

The latest versions of rpm-ostree and rpm-ostree-toolbox. You can even use rpm-ostree-toolbox to generate your own Atomic hosts from a custom set of packages.

Introduction of the Atomic command line tool to help manage Linux containers on Atomic Hosts and update Atomic Hosts.

Fedora 22 Server

Fedora 22 Server Edition brings several changes that will improve Fedora for use as a server in your environment.

Database Server Role: Fedora 21 introduced rolekit, a daemon for Linux systems that provides a stable D-Bus interface to manage deployment of server roles. The Fedora 22 release adds onto that work with a database server role based on PostgreSQL.

Cockpit Updates: The Cockpit Web-based management application has been updated to the latest upstream release which adds many new features as well as a modular design for adding new functionality.

XFS as default filesystem. XFS scales better for servers and can handle higher storage capacity and we have made it the default filesystem for Fedora 22 server users. Other filesystems including ext4 will continue to be supported and the ability to choose them have been retained.

Fedora 22 Workstation

As always, Fedora carries a number of improvements to make life better for its desktop users and developers! Here's some of the goodness you'll get in Fedora 22 Workstation edition.

Enhancements:

The GNOME Shell notification system has been redesigned and subsumed into the calendar widget.

The Terminal now notifies you when a long running job completes.

The login screen now uses Wayland by default with automatic fallback to Xorg when necessary. This is a transitional step towards replacing Xorg with Wayland by default in the next release and should have no user visible difference.

Installation of GStreamer codecs, fonts, and certain document types is now handled by Software, instead of gnome-packagekit.

The Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) now features better notifications, and uses the privacy control panel in GNOME to control information sent.

Appearance:

The Nautilus file manager has been improved to use GActions, from the deprecated GtkAction APIs, for a better, more consistent experience.

The GNOME Shell has a refreshed theme for better usability.

The Qt/Adwaita theme is now code complete, and Qt notifications have been improved for smoother experience using Qt-based apps in Workstation.

Under the covers:

Consistent input handling for graphical applications is provided using libinput library which is now used for both X11 and Wayland.

Spins

Fedora spins are alternative versions of Fedora, tailored for various types of users via hand-picked application sets or customizations. You can browse all of the available spins via http://spins.fedoraproject.org. Some of the popular ones include:

Fedora 22 KDE Plasma spin

Plasma 5, the successor to KDE Plasma 4, is now the default workspace in the Fedora KDE spin. It has a new theme called Breeze, which has cleaner visuals and better readability, improves certain work-flows and provides overall 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).

Fedora 22 Xfce spin

The Xfce spin has been updated to Xfce 4.12. This release has an enormous number of improvements, including HiDPI support, improvements to window tiling, support for Gtk3 plugins, and many improvements for multi-monitor support.

Issues and Details

This is an Beta release. As such, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the test mailing list or in #fedora-qa on freenode.

As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F22 Bugs page.

Roadmap

While Fedora 22 is still under active development, we have a number of new features developed in parallel for Fedora 23 as well. While all of these features are work in progress and the plans have not been finalized, we want to highlight a few major changes expected and invite your early testing and feedback.

Wayland by default for Fedora 23 Workstation. XWayland will continue to be provided for compatibility with applications using X.

Python 3 by default for Fedora 23 Workstation: While most of the default applications are already using Python 3 in Fedora 22, Fedora 23 Workstation will only include Python 3 by default. Python 2 will continue to be included in the repositories.

A Vagrant image for Fedora 23 Atomic Host and Cloud Images. We're supplying Vagrant boxes that work with KVM or VirtualBox, so users on Fedora will be able to easily consume the Vagrant images with KVM, and users on Mac OS X or Windows can use the VirtualBox image.



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

Release Schedule

The full release schedule is available on the Fedora wiki. The current schedule calls for a final release in the end of May.

These dates are subject to change, pending any major bugs or issues found during the testing process.