Now that Fedora 22(f22) has been released officially, we can all run the latest kernel version i.e, v4.0.4 which is present there by default. This particular post is intended to spread some light over the changes during the transition from fedora 21(f21) to 22. The following points are explained from my experience with the latest version after up-gradation. When version 21 was released, I followed the fedup procedure. Since the up-gradation was successful, I decided to do fedup for version 22 too and it doesn’t disappoint me in any aspect. In fact at first attempt it complained about the lack of disk space on my laptop and I had to do a massive clean-up to recover some free space. I wonder why it requires too much of disk space. Post installation steps were really helpful in building the rpm database so that future errors can be avoided.

DNF or YUM: Do they differ?
I would say no for this question because I couldn’t find any major difference. They could have announced that we are renaming yum to dnf. Instead they made dnf as an advanced yum and for an end-user its pretty much the same thing. One important thing to notice here is that its super fast in resolving the dependencies and parallel downloading of packages. I really loved this improvement as it took more time for yum previously. Being said that, dnf is not stable yet. I encountered a bug (which was reported for f21 and re-reported for f22) in removing an installed group using dnf for which it complained that such a group doesn’t exist. Any way I could uninstall it by undoing that transaction through the history command available from dnf (or yum probably). Please keep in mind that yum command is still available as yum-deprecated binary and if you try plain yum by practise/convention or whatever, it will be re-directed to dnf by default. It works with python2 and python3.

Oh..! Gnome transparency lost?
I really loved the transparency in displaying gnome calendar, network settings and so on from dash in Gnome 3.14. The whole transparency was removed in v3.16, which is present there in f22 by default.

Bigger folder icons
What the hell is this? They have made the folder icon size really big. The nautilus file-manager now shows bigger icons which is really bad. They could have kept this part as it was in the previous version of Gnome.

Notifications from top panel
Previously with Gnome 3.14, we could see a message bar which is invoked by Win+m. By this version they shrinked that to bottom left corner and got rid of notifications from the same. Now onwards notifications are shown from top-panel and are displayed along with gnome-calendar. But the keyboard short-cuts remains the same.

Welcome GCC5 and Kernel v4.0
These were the two main features for f22. You could see the v4.0 kernel changes from the following link http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_4.0. Among these changes the live patching of kernel was the prominent one. Since I contribute to GlusterFS project, I was eager to know the result of compiling the project source code with gcc5. Let me say frankly, the compilation resulted in lot of warnings and it affects the overall functionality of the file system. Need to look into that in near future.

Much awaited Wayland
All linux distros uses X server for GUI display. Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it. As a start with f22, the login screen has been implemented with Wayland.

Python3, Fedora Atomic Host, Vagrant . . .
The idea isn’t only to provide python 3 as the default python interpreter for f22 but software packages within fedora bearing python dependencies (such as Anaconda) should also use python 3. Any future python-dependent projects for fedora will be built for python 3 by default. With Project Atomic, Red Hat devised a standard pattern for using its OS as a deployment system for Docker containers. Previously, fedora implemented the Project Atomic pattern as a Docker host for the cloud. Vagrant is used to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.

So that’s all and happy hacking . .!!