The Fedora Project has announced the general availability of the latest version of its operating system, Fedora 32. It includes new features aimed at addressing issues facing developers and IT teams. Highlights include key updates to Fedora’s desktop-focused edition, Fedora 32 Workstation, and a new computational neuroscience lab image, aimed at bringing those working in science fields to open-source software.
Each Fedora edition is designed to address specific use cases for developers and IT teams with Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server providing open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects. Updates included in Fedora 32 include:
- The introduction of EarlyOOM on Fedora 32 Workstation that will enable users to more quickly recover and regain control over their system rather than needing to force power off in low-memory situations with heavy swap usage.
- Support for Fedora 32 Workstation on Arm aarch64 architecture, which includes Raspberry Pi architectures.
- Enabling fstrim.timer on the Fedora 32 Workstation by default to help optimize the storage stack, offering improvements around performance and wear levelling for some devices. The fstrim command executes weekly and informs both physical and virtual storage divides of unused blocks.
- A prepackaged, ready-to-install Computational Neuroscience Lab image to help encourage the use of free and open-source software in scientific work.
- Improvements in support for Arm devices, including for the NVIDIA Jetson platform and Pine64 devices and a new open-source graphics driver for Arm Mali-400 series GPUs.
Fedora 32 Workstation provides new tools and features for general users as well as developers with the inclusion of GNOME 3.36 that will provide significant performance and user experience enhancements. As with all Fedora edition updates, this edition has been updated with minor bug fixes and package tweaks including updates to key programming languages and system library packages including GCC 10, Ruby 2.7 and Python 3.8.
Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue will continue to evolve and update to better meet the requirements of modern IT, much of which is powered by Linux containers, Kubernetes and cloud computing.