Fedora 35

Fedora 35 is out, which we pay particular attention to at Floodgap Orbiting HQ since both our daily driver Talos II and HTPC Blackbird run Fedora. Even if you don't run it, it's a cutting-edge distro, so OpenPOWER-specific issues show up and (hopefully) get fixed here early, making it a good preview for other distros. I wasn't too happy with F34 so I'm hoping the only direction it can go is up this time around.

Fedora 35 upgrades to GNOME 41 with Wayland-specific performance improvements, a new default GL renderer for GTK4 and new options for power and window management. WirePlumber is also added to complement PipeWire in F34 for additional video and audio session policy control, along with Python 3.10, Perl 5.34, and PHP 8.0. It ships with kernel 5.14, rpm 4.17, glibc 2.34 and gcc 11.

However, there is still no motion on the 128-bit long double transition for OpenPOWER, and the F34 tracking bug has not been reopened. This most notoriously affects MAME but also a small and growing number of other packages, and I have no idea what's holding this up for so long — like, literally, years.

Now that F35 is out, F33 will end-of-life on November 30. We'll do our usual deep dive review in a few days after everything has updated.