On Heels of IBM Deal, Red Hat Boosts Community Linux With Fedora 29

Red Hat has been one busy company. On Oct. 28 the Linux vendor announced it was being acquired by IBM in a massive $34 billion deal. A day later, on Oct. 29, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, a new release of the company’s flagship platform, was announced. Red Hat’s community Fedora Linux project also has been busy, releasing Fedora 29 on Oct. 29 as well. Fedora 29 provides users with an improved experience across the desktop, server and cloud. Among the new items in Fedora 29 is the Silverblue edition for container use cases. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the highlights of the Fedora 29 release.

Fedora 29 is the second major release of Red Hat’s community Linux project in 2018; the Fedora 28 update became generally available on May 1.

The default desktop for the Fedora 29 Workstation edition is the GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, which was released on Sept. 6.

GNOME 3.30, code-named “Almeria,” benefits from improved desktop performance that uses fewer system resources.

Software packages bundled in the increasingly popular Flatpak approach now benefit from automatic updates.

With modularity in Fedora 29, system administrators can choose which version of software they want to run. Previously, specific versions of software were tied to any given Fedora release.

Fedora 29 includes Mozilla Firefox 63 as the default web browser.

The new Silverblue edition of Fedora 29 is the successor to the edition that was known as Fedora Atomic Workstation. Silverblue has been developed to help enable container use cases, and it also benefits from the open-source rpm-ostree package management system for incremental (or atomic) updates.

At the core of Fedora 29 is a Linux 4.18 kernel. The Linux 4.18 kernel was released on Aug. 12 by Linux creator Linus Torvalds.