GNOME 3.16 will be the default desktop environment

Feb 12, 2015 12:56 GMT  ·  By

While Fedora 21 has been officially released on December 9, 2014, and users worldwide still enjoy the powerful operating system on their desktop or server computers, the time has come to look at the future and see what the forthcoming Fedora 22 release has prepared for its dedicated users.

We all know that the default desktop environment of Fedora Linux is GNOME, despite the fact that numerous official spins exist with KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and other desktops, so probably the most important feature of the Fedora 22 release is the upgrade to the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 graphical desktop environment.

GNOME 3.16 will bring a wide range of improvements, new and updated applications, various UI tweaks and lots of bugfixes, as well as better support for the Wayland compositor, especially for the GDM login manager on the main Fedora Live CD image. Better GNOME Shell notifications and an improved Nautilus file manager will also be part of Fedora 22.

The KDE spin of Fedora 22 will include KDE Plasma 5

As expected, the KDE spin of the Fedora 22 operating system will be upgraded to the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, which is based on the latest Qt5 and KDE Frameworks 5 technologies. Also, the Pantheon desktop environment of elementary OS might also be added in the upcoming Fedora 22 release.

Among other upcoming features of Fedora 22, we can mention backlist updates for UEFI Secure Boot, the eurlatgr font as default for the terminal emulator, Wine will use Direct3D9 by default, and the addition of the Elasticsearch package.

Yum will be replaced with DNF (Dandified Yum)

In addition, Fedora developers plan on updating the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) package to version 9.10, switch to the 5.x branch of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) and rebuild as many packages as possible with it, update the GHC Haskell compiler to version 7.8, make Python 3 as the default Python implementation, replace Yum With DNF (Dandified Yum), update Ruby to version 2.2, Perl to version 5.20, and Ruby on Rails to version 4.2.

The Fedora 22 development cycle will start with the Alpha built on March 10 and continue with the Beta version April 14. The final release of Fedora 22 should arrive to users worldwide in approximately 3 months from today, on May 19, 2015, but we all know that Fedora is prone to numerous delays, which will most probably be announced on this space.