Fedora 38 is now out of beta. It introduces two new spins, one with the Budgie desktop environment and one with the Sway tiling window manager. Its GNOME spin moves to GNOME 44. Fedora 38 also removes restrictions and whitelisting from its flatpak implementation.

Fedora 38 comes with Linux Kernel 6.2 which brings full Intel Arc graphics support and an enhancement for the Nvidia Nouveau driver. The new release also includes updates to the following programming languages: Python 3.11, Ruby 3.1, and Node.js 17.

The popular Budgie Desktop environment, first packaged for Fedora in F37, now has its own Spin. The Fedora Budgie Spin aims to provide the premiere Budgie Desktop experience on top of Fedora Linux, the leading edge platform for developers and users alike. For fans of tiling window managers, Fedora 38 now offers the Sway window manager in a Spin and in an rpm-ostree version we call “Sericea”. Sway uses the modern Wayland protocol and aims to be a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager.

This release shortens the shutdown times, enables Wayland by default for the SDDM login manager, adds stricter SSH host keys permissions, offers support for persistent overlays for the live media when flashed to USB sticks, and brings you an unfiltered Flathub repository for a better Flatpak app experience.

“This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third-party repositories feature. In the graphical software manager app, Flathub packages will only be selected by default when no Fedora package is available,” said the Fedora Project.

Simply go ahead to the Fedora Project to download and try out Fedora 38!

Way back in 2018, Fedora 28 had introduced EPEL 8 modules, which allowed one to install multiple versions of the same software and switch between them, making them modular. For example, one might need to keep switching between a nodejs 8.x, 10.x and 12.x based on the software requirement, or even switching between a Python 2 and Python 3 as many of the ealier softwares are not yet compatible with Python 3.

Fedora being the upstream distro to Redhat (and CentOS, before it became CentOS Stream and became a mid-stream distro), was facing the same problem like any other open source software of either being too aggressive in releases or too slow to release. While the package the user wants may be available, it might not be available in the version needed.

So the way Fedora modularity would solve the problem was by shipping with the standard versions of the software, and while at it, you would have the flexibility to install the Fedora Modular Repos to get the stable EPEL versions of the softwares.

However, over the years, the EPEL 8 repo seems to have hardly any takers. The strange mixture of Fedora ecosystem and RHEL modularity never worked properly. There have been routine instances of modules that wouldn’t install, modules that overwrote RHEL modules, Fedora maintainers surprised their modules were in EPEL, and the constant issue that EPEL modules couldn’t depend on RHEL modules.

Thus drawing a conclusion to this experiment. Both CentOS Stream as well as Fedora have officially announced that the modular EPEL 8 will be retiring in a phasely manner and below is the timeline for the same…

• October 31, 2022
  • An updated epel-release will be pushed to the epel8 repo
  • This sets “enabled = 0” for epel-modular, if you haven’t already changed your config
  • epel-modular full name will have “DEPRECATED” in it
• February 15, 2023
  • The infrastructure for building and publishing epel8 modules will be removed
  • The EPEL 8 modules will be archived and removed
  • The mirror manager will be pointed to the archive

It is now no longer recommended to install or access the EPEL 8 modular repo after 31st October 2022.

To start with RedHat is most known for its association with RedHat Enterprise Linux and is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and CentOS Stream along with many other open source projects. Redhat Inc. was acquired by IBM in 2019 and is now operated as an independent subsidiary of IBM.

Why would the same company want to maintain 3 Linux operating systems?

To start with, all the 3 of these Linux distributions use the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) packages. Most of the packages can be used interchangebly amongst these Linux distributions. So in order to understand the basic difference between them, we need to first understand the difference between a community distribution (commonly called as distro) and an enterprise distribution.

Community vs enterprise distro

Linux as we all know is a free and open source operating system. Which means anybody who understands it well enough can develop features into a distro and add it to the repository for it to become a part of the upcoming release. This ensures that you always have the bleeding edge features in community based distro. However, it does come with a drawback, that the new features may not have been tested well, so an updated would be soon on its way. This causes stability issues from an enterprise perspective. Enterprises prefer to have fixed periodic update cycles with a long term support (LTS). This is where comes the enterprise Linux distro. Enterprise Linux distros are tested with wider audience, features are stabilised and only then are added to the final release.

Fedora release cycle

Fedora Linux falls under the category of community Linux distro. They have a release cycle of around 6 months with the support for the current version being valid till a month after the release of the next version.

CentOS Stream release cycle

CentOS release cycle matches with that of Redhat releases. The major version number matches that of the major release of Redhat, while the minor version number being the actual release update. Starting with CentOS Stream, it is now an upstream Linux distro to Redhat.

Redhat release cycle

Redhat is a commercial enterprise linux distro with fixed release and support cycles. Red Hat releases a new point version of a particular series every year and a major version after approximately 5 years. It offers 10-year life cycle support so you can better support long-term apps.

Upstream vs Downstream distro

The development and release cycle of a Linux distro can be compared also whether it is upstream to Redhat or downstream to Redhat.

The bleeding edge upstream is Fedora. Fedora matures into CentOS stream. CentOS Stream is a “continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora and Redhat distros. With CentOS only recently moving to upstream releases to Redhat, it will be worth keeping a watch on how often do the releases happen in CentOS Stream.

Since in upstream, CentOS Stream lies between Fedora and Redhat, it is expected to have releases more often than Redhat, however lesser often as compared to Fedora. CentOS Stream 9 releases will give a better picture towards this.

And then there are downstream distros which were launched after Redhat announced the change in the stance of CentOS from the earlier downstream distro to upstream, from its CentOS Stream. These distros are Rocky Linux (by the founder of CentOS Project) and Alma Linux (from the house of CloudLinux). They are also gaining wide spread popularity, as they track close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are as stable as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are free to use.

You can read more about whether to opt for CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux before making up your mind for your next installation.