After releasing Fedora 29 beta last month, the Fedora community announced the stable release of Fedora 29. This is the first release to include Fedora Modularity across all Fedora variants, that is, Workstation, Server, and AtomicHost. Other updates include upgrading to GNOME 3.30, ZRAM for ARM images, and a Vagrant image for Fedora Scientific.
Additionally, Node.js is now updated to Node.js 10.x as its default Node.js interpreter, Python 3.6 is updated to Python 3.7, and Ruby on Rails is updated to 5.2.
Fedora Modularity
Modularity gives you the option to install additional versions of software on independent life cycles. You no longer have to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions. It will allow you to keep your OS up-to-date while keeping the right version of an application, even when the default version in the distribution changes.
These are the advantages it comes with:
Moving fast and slow
Different users have different needs, for instance, while developers want the latest versions possible, system administrators prefer stability for a longer period of time. With Fedora Modularity, as per your use case, you can make some parts to move slowly, and other parts to move faster by choosing between latest release or stability.
Automatically rebuild containers
Many containers are built manually and are not actively maintained. Also, very often they are not patched with security fixes but are still used by many people. To allow maintaining and building multiple versions, Modularity comes with an environment for packagers. These containers get automatically rebuilt every time the packages get updated.
Automating packager workflow
Often, Fedora contributors have to maintain their packages in multiple branches. As a result, they have to perform a series of manual steps during the build process. Modularity allows packagers to maintain a single source for multiple outputs and brings an additional automation to the package build process.
Fedora Silverblue
This release introduces the newly named Fedora Silverblue, formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation. It provides atomic upgrades, easy rollbacks, and workflows that are familiar from OSTree-based servers. Additionally, it delivers desktop applications as Flatpaks. This gives better isolations and solves longstanding issues with using yum/dnf for desktop applications.
GNOME 3.30
The default desktop environment of Fedora 29 is based on GNOME 3.30. This version of GNOME comes with improved desktop performance and screen sharing. It supports automatic updates for Flatpak, a next-generation technology for building and distributing applications on Linux.
Read the full announcement of Fedora 29 release on its official website.
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