Fedora 29 beta brings Modularity, GNOME 3.30 support and other changes

Fedora 29 Beta was made available yesterday. It is the next big step towards a stable release of the Linux distribution. The stable version will be available late October. This beta brings features like modularity for all, support for GNOME 3.30 and some other changes.

Modularity

Modular repositories were introduced in Fedora 28 for the Fedora Server Edition. In Fedora 29 beta, modularity is available in all the editions, spins and labs. Modularity makes multiple versions of important packages available in parallel. It will work with the familiar Dandified YUM (DNF) package. With modularity, users can update their OS to the latest version while maintaining the required version of an application for proper functionality.

GNOME 3.30

Fedora 29 Workstation Beta comes with the latest version of GNOME. GNOME 3.30 streamlines performance and adds a new application for Podcasts. It also automatically updates Flatpaks in Software Center.

Other changes

There are also many other updates included in the Fedora 29.

Fedora Atomic Workstation is now rebranded as Fedora Silverblue.

The GRUB menu will be hidden where only a single OS is installed as it does not provide any useful functionality in those cases.

The latest version of Fedora also brings updates to many popular packages including MySQL, GNU C Library, Python, and Perl.

Some architecture changes include dropping as an alternative architecture, initial support for field programming gate array (FPGAs), and packages are now built with SSE2 support.

Many projects including Eclipse have dropped support for the big endian ppc64 architecture. So now Fedora will have to discontinue producing any ppc64 content.

Fedora Scientific will now be shipped as vagrant boxes which were previously delivered as ISO files. Vagrant boxes will give potential users a friendlier option to try Fedora Scientific while keeping the current operating system.