Fedora 30 was released on April 30. The Fedora Wiki contains a complete list of the changes that were accepted for inclusion in this release. These changes include two new desktop environments, other new features, and bug fixes. Some older packages have been deprecated or completely removed.
As you can see in my previous post, I have already upgraded all of my physical hosts and I have created a new VM for Fedora 30. All of these hosts are working very well and I have not had any problems so far.
Fedora 30 and my books
Fedora 30 should make no difference in any of the experiments in my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Apress, 2018. That book was written using Fedora 28 but everything should also work just fine with Fedora 29 and 30.
I am also working on two new books, the titles of which I cannot yet divulge. The experiments in these two books are being tested to ensure that they work on Fedora 29 and 30. These books should be available late this year but I will keep you informed with future posts here on this site.
The changes
I have listed some of what I consider the more interesting changes along with a short description of each. Much of this information is distilled directly from the Wiki page but I have not included all of the changes listed on that wiki page.
New desktop environments
DeepinDE
Add the Deepin
Desktop Environment. Deepin is a Chinese Linux distribution and
DeepinDE is its desktop. The DeepinDE is based on the Qt 5 toolkit so
can be easily installed on other distributions. It is intended to be
simple and easy for new users.
Pantheon Desktop
Another new desktop for Fedora, the Pantheon
desktop environment is the minimalist Desktop Environment that powers
elementaryOS. It
builds on GNOME technologies, but utilizes components that were
written from scratch in vala, using the GTK+3 toolkit.
Other changes
Bash 5.0
Upgrade bash to 5.0 release. This release fixes several
outstanding bugs in bash-4.4 and introduces several new features. The
new features include some new Bash environment variables and improved
history command that can delete ranges of history.
Boot Loader
Make BootLoaderSpec-style configuration files the default. This
change enables the use of per-boot-entry configuration files, similar
to those described in Boot Loader Specification (BLS), to populate
the bootloader’s menu entries.
dbus-broker
Make dbus-broker the default DBus implementation. Enable
dbus-broker.service to use dbus-broker as system and session message
bus backend. DBUS provides communications that allow things like plug
and play to work by distributing event notifications to applications
and kernel level tools.
Boost 1.69 upgrade
This change brings Boost 1.69 to Fedora. Boost is a set of free,
peer-reviewed, portable C++ source libraries This will mean Fedora
ships with a recent upstream Boost release.
Flicker Free Boot
Make Fedora Workstation boot graphically smooth, without the
display briefly turning off and without any abrupt graphical
transitions.
FreeIPA Python 2 Removal
No it is not free beer! FreeIPA 4.8 will require Python 3.6+ and
therefore no longer provide Python 2 packages on Fedora 30.
libcrypt
Fully remove deprecated and unsafe functions from libcrypt. This
change is about removing binary support for deprecated and unsafe
functions and bumping libcrypt.so to libcrypt.so.2.
GCC9
Switch GCC in Fedora 30 to 9.x.y. An attempt will be made to
rebuild all packages with it, or optionally rebuild just some
packages with it and rebuild everything else in Fedora 31.
GNU C Library
Switch glibc in Fedora 30 to glibc version 2.29.
GNOME 3.32
Update GNOME to the latest upstream release, 3.32.
GnuPG 2
Use GnuPG2 as the default GPG implementation. The /usr/bin/gpg
path representing the main GPG implementation will now use GnuPG 2
instead of GnuPG 1.
Mass Python 2 Package
(Sub-)packages only providing python2 importable modules without
additional functionality will be removed from Fedora unless some
other package(s) depends on them.
Obsolete Scriptlets
Remove scriptlets which are not needed anymore (ldconfig,
gtk-update-icon-cache, etc.).
Locale settings
When logging in over ssh or another mechanism, locale settings are
forwarded. If the destination does not support that locale, C.UTF-8
will be used instead.
Ruby 2.6
Ruby 2.6 is the latest stable version of Ruby. Many new features
and improvements are included for the increasingly diverse and
expanding demands for Ruby. With this major update from Ruby 2.5 in
Fedora 29 to Ruby 2.6 in Fedora 30, Fedora becom
Deprecate /etc/sysconfig/nfs
Deprecate /etc/sysconfig/nfs and only use /etc/nfs.conf to
configure NFS daemons.
uEFI for ARMv7
Move to uEFI as the default boot mechanism for ARMv7 devices.
Fish 3.0
Update Fish to 3.0. Fish allows tools like Midnight Commander and
other file managers to access filesystems on remote hosts for easy
copy and move from one host to another.
Haskell GHC 8.4 and Stackage LTS 12
Update the ghc Haskell compiler version from 8.2.2 to 8.4.4 and
Haskell packages to Stackage LTS 12 versions.
LXQt 0.14.0
Update LXQt to 0.14.0.
MongoDB Removal
The Server Side Public Licensev1 (SSPL) under which MongoDB is
distributed is not a Free Software License. Therefore, MongoDB has
been removed.
java-openjdk JDK12
Update rolling package of java-openjdk to JDK12
krb5 crypto modernization
krb5 will be removing support for DES, 3DES, crc-32, and MD4
entirely; they will not be allowed in session keys or long-term keys.
Additionally, RC4 and MD5 will be marked deprecated and dangerous.
PHP 7.3
Update the PHP stack to latest version 7.3.x