The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 34 following a little over a month of beta testing. Fedora 34 ships with the new GNOME 40 desktop which comes with a big overhaul of the GNOME interface compared to GNOME 3.38 (the previous version). Additionally, the default BTRFS file system comes with transparent compression enabled which should prolong the life of solid-state disks.
Apart from the main Fedora Workstation (which is the version you’ll probably want), Fedora Server, Fedora IoT, and Fedora CoreOS have been updated to version 34 too. Fedora Spins, which provide other desktop environments, and Fedora Labs which are tailored for specific use cases have also been updated to the latest version of Fedora.
Notably, the KDE spin of Fedora 34 has finally switched from the X11 window manager to Wayland, this was already the case for the GNOME edition of Fedora since version 25 released in 2016. As more users come over to Wayland, software developers will have to ensure that their programs support Wayland as well as they supported X11. The main body of Linux users will come over to Wayland in 2022 with the launch of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS which should be using Wayland.
Other changes in this release include a switch from PulseAudio to PipeWire to better support Flatpaks, systemd-oomd has been enabled on all Fedora variants to better handle out-of-memory situations, several programming language packages have been updated (Ruby 3.0, Golang 1.16), and an i3 window manager Fedora Spin is now available for download.
If you’re running Fedora 33 and want to upgrade, make a backup of your data and follow these instructions. If you do not yet have Fedora but would like to download Fedora 34, head over to the Fedora website and download the version you’d like.