14 DAY TRIAL // The Fedora Project announced today the final release of the long-anticipated Fedora 31 computer operating system sponsored by the Open Source giant Red Hat.
Fedora 31 has been in development during the past six months, and after a one-week delay, it's finally here packed with some of the latest and greatest Open Source software and GNU/Linux technologies, including the GNOME 3.34 desktop environment, Linux 5.3 kernel, Glibc 2.30, Python 3, and Node.js 12.
However, with this release, Fedora Linux says goodbye to 32-bit installations as it no longer offers ISO images to allow users to install the operating system on older machines with 32-bit processors, from more than 20 years ago. The 32-bit software repositories will also not be available anymore.
"If you’re using an older 32-bit only i686 system, though, it’s time to find an alternative — we bid farewell to 32-bit Intel architecture as a base system this release," said project leader Matthew Miller. "No matter what variant of Fedora you use, you’re getting the latest the open source world has to offer."
The many improvements of Fedora 31
Fedora 31 brings numerous other improvements for fans of the open-source operating system, including variable Google Noto fonts, Qt Wayland and Firefox Wayland by default in GNOME, zstd compression for RPMs for faster updates, automatic R runtime dependencies, minimal GDB in buildroot, and custom crypto policies.
On top of that, Fedora 31 also disables root password login in SSH, improves Fedora Toolbox containerized workflow, enables net.ipv4.ping_group_range parameter in the Linux kernel to let users create ICMP Echo sockets without using setuid binaries, and improves support for Rockchip SoC devices like Rock960, RockPro64, and Rock64.
Initial support for "panfrost", an open-source 3D accelerated graphics driver for newer Arm Mali "midgard" GPUs is present as well in Fedora 31, which ships with an up-to-date toolchain that includes GCC 9, RPM 4.15, Perl 5.30, Golang 1.13, Mono 5.20, Erlang 22, GHC 8.6, IBus 1.5.21, and Gawk 5.0.1.
The Fedora Spins ships with updated components as well, including the Xfce 4.14, KDE Plasma 5.16, LXQt 0.14.1, and DeepinDE 15.11 desktop environments. You can download Fedora 31 right now through our free software portal with any of the many flavors and spins in comes as Fedora Linux offers something for everyone.