Fedora 26 Beta Comes with New Features

The Fedora project has announced the beta of Fedora 26, the latest version of Fedora OS. Three editions of Fedora target three different markets: Fedora 26 Workstation Beta, Fedora 26 Server, and Fedora 26 Atomic.

As the name implies, Workstation targets desktop users, the Server edition is aimed at sys admins running servers, and Atomic targets DevOps, for managing cloud- and container-centric infrastructures.

Although each edition targets a different market segment, they all share the same fundamental Fedora technologies, and the only differences are in what comes packaged with each edition.

All three versions share these new components: updated compilers and languages, including GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 7; Go 1.8; Python 3.6 and Ruby 2.4; DNF 2.0 with backward compatibility with Yum; a new storage configuration screen for the Anaconda installation program, enabling “bottom-up” configuration from devices and partitions; and updates to Fedora Media Writer that enable users to create bootable SD cards with Fedora for ARM-based devices, like Raspberry Pi.

New in the desktop edition is Gnome 3.24, which offers many new features, including batch rename of files and night mode. One of the highlights of this release is many improvements to Builder – to support a number of application build systems, including Flatpak, CMake, Meson, and Rust – in addition to integration with Valgrind for project profiling.

As containers become more and more important, Fedora Atomic offers a great platform for running container-based workloads in the cloud or on bare metal. One of the most notable features of Fedora Atomic Host is containerized Kubernetes to run different versions of the container orchestration engine.

All three editions are available for download and testing.