Exciting Features For Fedora 20 "Heisenbug"

Assuming there's no major last minute snafus, Fedora 20 will be released in two week's time. Due to the multiple delays that hit Fedora 20 and not all features being completed in time, here's a look at some of the most exciting features that were finished and will be found in this next major release of the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution.

Among my favorite changes for Fedora 20 are listed below (in no particular order) while a complete listing of the official "Heisenbug" changes can be found via this Wiki page.

- GNOME 3.10 on the desktop serves as the latest GNOME stable release. Fedora 20 also features the new desktop application installer that replaces the GNOME PackageKit front-ends.

- For the non-GNOME users, there is KDE Plasma 4.11, Xfce 4.10, and new to the Fedora package repository are official RPMs for the Enlightenment 0.18 window manager.

- The GNOME Wayland "tech preview" for Fedora 20 didn't make it as far along as some would hope, but all of the necessary packages are now in place. It's easy to try the GNOME Shell on Wayland with Fedora 20 and I've already published Fedora GNOME Wayland benchmarks.

- There's no sendmail or syslog by default.

- ARM has finally made it as a primary architecture in the Fedora world! ARM is now supported alongside Intel 32-bit (i686) and 64-bit (x86_64) architectures as ensuring package support for "armv7hl" (ARMv7 hard floating-point) and there's official spins of Fedora for ARM.

- Fedora 20 is packing the Linux 3.11 kernel and glibc 2.18.

- Fedora 20 is now easier to setup if you want an SSD cache configuration. Similar to solid-state hybrid drives (SSHD), on recent kernels it's possible to use BCache and DM-Cache to use a small solid-state drive as a cache for conventional HDDs. Changes in Fedora 20 make it easier to setup a Linux SSD cache configuration through the Fedora Anaconda installer.

- Virtualization improvements with virt-manager now being able to easily manage virtual machine snapshots, improved ARM virtualization support, and other enhancements to the KVM-focused Linux virtualization.

- Many updated and new packages are found in the Fedora repository. One of the packaging areas where the Fedora / Red Hat developers always tend to be aggressive -- and generally it turns out quite well -- is with shipping the bleeding-edge open-source Linux / X.Org graphics drivers. That's the case again for Fedora 20.

Stay tuned for plenty more Fedora 20 articles and benchmarks when the release is on final approach in December.