Fedora 35 Rawhide
Mayank Sharma is pleasantly surprised to discover that this distro, which can trace its roots back to the early days of Linux, hides another one in plain sight.
A distro that can trace its roots back to the early days of Linux, and Mayank Sharma discovers it hides another one in plain sight.
The latest version of Fedora Linux 34 was released at the end of April 2021 (check our review in LXF277) . However, it branched from the testing branch dubbed Rawhide, back in February, which marked the beginning of the development stage for Fedora 35.
Although Fedora 35 won’t arrive before late October or early November, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has already approved a large number of proposed features for the release, so we have a good idea of what the upcoming distro will bring.
One of the changes is the move to WirePlumber. While Fedora 34 shipped with PipeWire
for managing audio/video streams, replacing PulseAudio, with Fedora 35 the distro will use WirePlumber, which is touted as an advanced PipeWire
session manager. Don’t worry too much if this is the first time you’ve heard of WirePlumber. Fedora’s raison d’être is to innovate by introducing cool, new stuff. It came into being as a rapidly moving platform, and by its nature moves quickly, with a new release every six months.
Fedora Linux started in 2002 as a volunteer project to provide well-tested third-party software packages for the Red Hat Linux (RHL) distro. RHL had its first release in May 1995 and rose to become one of the first commercially successful Linux distro. When Red Hat realised it can’t stabilise and innovate on the same distro, it discontinued RHL and created Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as its paid enterprise-grade distro, while it merged RHL with Fedora Linux repository to launch the officially supported, community distro, known as Fedora Core Linux.
Strength in unity
Fedora Core had two main software repositories: core and extras. One was maintained by Red Hat and the other by the community. The distinction was dropped starting with Fedora 7, when the two repos were merged and put under the guidance of the community.
The next major step in the evolution of the distro came with the release of Fedora 21 in 2014. With the release, the single distro was split into three editions, namely Workstation, focused on desktop use cases; Server for server deployment; and Atomic, designed for cloud computing.
Fast forward to 2019’s Fedora 30, which persisted with the Workstation, and Server editions, but replaced Atomic with CoreOS to focus on cloud computing deployments. The release also added a couple of more editions to the Fedora lineup, in the form of Silverblue, which focused on an immutable desktop specially designed for container-based use cases and IoT, designed for IoT devices.
Development of Fedora takes place inside Rawhide, which is both the name of a repository and a distro. Package managers integrate the newest usable versions of their packages inside Rawhide, and at the end of every day a snapshot if the repository is compiled into an installable distro. In addition to being a useful platform for package maintainers, Rawhide also serves as an excellent rolling release for the advanced users willing to keep up with its continuous flow of updates.
Red Hat saw Fedora as a means to give new features a platform to stabilise before they could be introduced in its long-supported enterprise-grade RHEL. So for instance, Fedora 12 became the base for RHEL 6, Fedora 19 for RHEL 7, and Fedora 28 for RHEL 8.
The introduction of CentOS Stream has added another stepping stone between Fedora and RHEL, but Fedora continues its tradition of giving users a bleedingedge showcase of the best Linux innovations.