Fedora 26, the latest version of the Fedora operating system has been finally released. Fedora is a Unix-like computer operating system based on the Linux kernel and GNU programs. Fedora Linux distribution, which is a community-driven project by Red Hat, the billion dollars Open Source company, is known for shipping the cutting edge technologies twice a year. Having said that, let’s look at the new features Fedora 26 brings for us.
Fedora Workstation uses GNOME as the default desktop environment but provides other spins based on KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE etc. Fedora comes in three versions namely Workstation (for desktop), Server and Atomic (for containers).
Some of the Main Features Of Fedora 26:
1. Modular Server Preview
For system administrators, Fedora has added a Fedora Modular Server preview build. The purpose of this preview release is to request feedback from the user community.
“As we progress down the modularity path, we finally have enough content, architecture, and understanding that we would like to release an edition of Fedora that is actually usable. However, as we aren’t ready for production yet, we would like to do a “preview” release so that people can see it and try it but it doesn’t actually take the place of a production edition,” says the Fedora 26 Release notes.
2. GNOME 3.24 Portland
Fedora 26 features the new GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, which includes a host of new features like Night Light, an application that subtly changes the screen color as the day passes to relieve your eyes from any strain, and LibreOffice 5.3, the latest update to the popular open-source office productivity suite. The Weather information is now included in the notification area and a new community-developed app named ‘Recipes’ has also been added.
“For developers, GNOME 3.24 provides matured versions of Builder and Flatpak to make application development for a variety of systems, including Rust and Meson, easier across the board,” says the Fedora Project.
3. Kernel: aarch64 48-bit Virtual Address Space
Before Fedora 26, the aarch64 kernel in Fedora used a 42-bit process virtual address (VA) space and due to the way aarch64 paging works, this constrained the maximum physical address as well. The 42-bit VA was fairly limiting for some applications, but aarch64 processors also have support for 48-bit VAs.
For Fedora 26, Fedora has introduced a 48-bit VA and so larger aarch64 processes won’t be constrained by the virtual or physical limitations of a 42-bit VA. This change also helps with things like hugetlb’s and potentially provides a performance boost. Additionally, it allows Fedora to boot on a class of machines that have the majority of their RAM higher in the address space.
It’s unlikely a desktop user will notice the change, except possibly that Fedora might now boot on additional hardware. A server user might find that there is more RAM available for in-memory databases etc.
4. ARM Support in Fedora Media Writer
Fedora Media Writer has gained the ability to write ARM images to SD cards and other portable media. Users, including those on Windows and macOS as well as on Fedora, will now be able to write Fedora images easily for Raspberry Pi 2 and above and for other supported ARM devices.
5. DNF 2.0
Fedora 26 Linux distro ships with DNF 2.0, the latest version of Fedora’s package management system. It brings many bugfixes and improvements over DNF 1.x, as well as changes required to fix incompatibilities with Yum, the predecessor of DNF.
DNF 2.0 provides usability improvements, including better messages during resolution errors, showing whether a package was installed as a weak dependency, better handling of obsolete packages, fewer tracebacks, and others.
6. Networking changes (OpenVPN 2.4.3, etc)
In Fedora 26, OpenVPN has been rebased to version 2.4.3. This had led to many improvements like improved elliptic curve cryptography support, support for AES-GCM, etc. There’s also a seamless client IP and port available, allowing clients to change their IP address or port without having to fully renegotiate an established tunnel.
7. Python Classroom Lab
Fedora 26 brings in a new Python Classroom Lab, a variant of Fedora targeted at teachers and students of the Python programming language. A ready to use environment with Python, PyPy 3, virtualenv, tox, git, Jupyter Notebook and more. It’s ready in three variants: as a GNOME powered desktop or headless for Vagrant and Docker.
8. New Spin: LXQt Desktop
Fedora LXQt desktop is known for its lightweight, well-integrated experience. A new LXQT spin has been shipped with Fedora 26 release. It features a small set of applications, such as QupZilla browser, which combines the rendering engine frtom Chromium with a nice Qt experience. As all applications use the same Qt5 toolkit and the Breeze theme known from KDE, the desktop provides a unified and well-integrated style and theming. In addition, breeze-gtk is provided to allow the user to integrate GTK applications too.
Other major package updates:
- Chinese input improvement
- Improved systemd integration
- SSSD fast caching is now enabled by default
- GCC 7.1
- GNU C library 2.25
- Boost 1.63
- OpenSSL 1.1.0
- Go 1.8
- Ruby 2.4
- Python 3.6
- PHP 7.1
- Zend Framework 3.0
You can find the complete set of changes here.
Upgrade to Fedora 26 from Fedora 25
If you are already using Fedora 25, you should be getting a notification about the availability of Fedora 26. Otherwise, you can manually upgrade to Fedora 26. You can find the Fedora 25 to Fedora 26 upgrade instructions here.
Download Fedora 26
You can get Fedora 26 for various versions from the links below:
If you prefer torrents over direct download links, you can get the torrents of all Fedora 26 versions on the link below:
