Ships with GNOME 3.34 desktop and Linux 5.2 kernel

Sep 18, 2019 16:01 GMT  ·  By

The Fedora Project has announced the general availability for public testing of the beta release of the upcoming Fedora 31 operating system.

Fedora 31 has been in development since early this summer and the beta version is now available to download for those who want to get an early taste of what's coming in the final release later this fall. The most important change in the Fedora 31 release is the fact that there won't be any 32-bit (i386) ISO images released, nor software repositories.

"We recognize that this means newer Fedora releases will no longer work on some older hardware, but the fact is there just hasn’t been enough contributor interest in maintaining i686, and we can provide greater benefit for the majority of our users by focusing on modern architectures," said Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader.

Another interesting change in the Fedora 31 release is the availability of a new Fedora flavor designed specifically for IoT (Internet of Things) devices, called Fedora IoT Edition, which will be available to download along with the Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, and Fedora Silverblue variants.

Final release expected at the end of October

Among some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies included in the Fedora 31 beta release, we can mention Linux kernel 5.3, GNU C Library 2.30, RPM 4.15, GNOME 3.34 desktop environment, Xfce 4.14 desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment, Gawk 5.0.1, Golang 1.13, Perl 5.30, DeepinDE 15.11, Erlang 22, GHC 8.6, IBus 1.5.21, Mono 5.20, and Node.js 12.x by default.

Other noteworthy changes include automatic R runtime dependencies, disabled root password login in SSH, zstd compression for RPMs, variable Google Noto fonts, YUM 3 deprecation, Qt Wayland and Firefox Wayland by default in GNOME, minimal GDB in buildroot, enablement of net.ipv4.ping_group_range in Linux kernel, and custom crypto policies.

The final release of Fedora 31 is expected at the end of October, possibly on the 22nd or the 29th. Until then, you can download the Fedora 31 Beta release right now through our website if you want to take it for a test drive and give feedback, but please note that this is still a pre-release version that shouldn't be installed on production systems.