Fedora 39

Fedora 39 is out, the Linux distro I use personally on my Talos II and Blackbird systems. Since I'm doing a lot of remote work with the new $DAYJOB it might be a bit before I can sit down with it but there will be the usual mini-review (here's what I had to say about Fedora 38). This release is based on kernel 6.5 and GNOME 45, with LLVM 17, Perl 5.38, glibc 2.38 and gcc 13.2. As usual, Fedora 37 will EOL one month after this release.

However, F39 isn't really the big news, and probably won't be a very exciting (or bumpy) release. Instead, the bigger and possibly more obnoxious change will occur with Fedora 40 when the Plasma spin (which I use instead of GNOME) is expected to completely drop X11 support, and the same is likely coming for GNOME 46 which will occur in the same version. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how this affects people running OpenPOWER systems without GPUs to be completely blob-less. I've not been terribly happy with Wayland on the Blackbird's ASpeed BMC framebuffer and I haven't seen anything to indicate that its deficiencies have improved. Wonder how well it would work on the X1 ...