The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 30. The release cycle sees the cloud and server variants merged into Fedora Server edition, while Fedora Atomic Host has become Fedora CoreOS. The latter hasn’t been released just yet and we’re told we should stay tuned for that announcement. The main Fedora Workstation edition, aimed at desktop computers, continues to deliver the latest open source software, including GNOME 3.32.
With GNOME 3.32, users should notice refreshed buttons and switches that are easier to identify, refreshed icons for apps, and snappier performance thanks to fixes and enhancements to the core GNOME libraries. Users who grab Fedora 30 will also be able to use the latest software including GCC 9, Bash 5.0, PHP 7.3, Ruby 2.6, and the Linux 5.0 kernel.
While Fedora uses the GNOME desktop environment by default, you can also use other desktop environments by downloading one of the various spins. With Fedora 30, two new spins will become available, the Deepin spin and the Pantheon spin.
The last significant piece of news pertaining to the Workstation release is the availability of Fedora Silverblue. This takes the Workstation release and mashes it with rpm-ostree which featured in Fedora Atomic Host. This allows you to do “worry-free” upgrades with backouts thanks to its immutable base. Flatpaks and RPM packages can be installed on top of this base too giving you full functionality on a more break-resistant base OS.
For those planning to download Fedora Server, be sure to research the newly added Linux System Roles. According to the project’s website, Linux System Roles are:
“... a collection of roles and modules executed by Ansible to assist Linux admins in the configuration of common GNU/Linux subsystems. Conceptually, the intent is to serve as a consistent “API” to a give [sic] Linux distribution that is consistent across multiple major and minor releases.”
Fedora 30 doesn’t have a set end of life date yet but it will be approximately one year from now, depending on how long subsequent releases get delayed. Fedora 30 will reach end-of-life status one month after the release of Fedora 32, and there’s about six months between releases.
You can download the new ISO images from GetFedora.org right now or use this guide to upgrade your existing Fedora 29 installation.