The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc., sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, today announced the general availability of Fedora 23, marking a noteworthy first year of Fedora releases driven by the Fedora.next initiative. Under Fedora.next, which serves as the umbrella planning phase for the Fedora Project’s next decade, the Fedora operating system split into three distinct editions with each release: Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server and Fedora Cloud, each serving a different role for end users.

Embracing the Fedora.next model has helped enable the Fedora Project team to better address the specific needs of its varied user base, from home desktop workers and developers to cloud administrators and corporate datacenter users. Not just limited to new features, the Fedora.next model has also delivered several operational improvements to the Fedora Project, allowing for:

  • Different release cycles under the Fedora operating system umbrella without requiring the creation of a downstream fork, highlighted by the two-week release cadence of Fedora Atomic Host
  • The three editions allow for a clearer delineation of features, helping release engineering teams to be able to push updates from the build system to users in half the time.

Fedora 23

The latest edition of the Fedora operating system, Fedora 23, brings updated and enhanced versions of Fedora’s three editions, all of which are built on a foundation of base packages, which includes updated versions of the Linux kernel, RPM, systemd, DNF and Anaconda. New to Fedora 23 is a “hardening” of these packages through the use of compiler flags, helping to prevent corruption, buffer overflows and other vulnerability issues.

Enhancements to the Fedora 23 editions include:

  • Fedora 23 Server gains a new role via the rolekit service in the form of a cache server for web applications, powered by memcached, bringing the total number of roles to three alongside the database server and domain controller roles. Additional tweaks and upgrades include the ability to use rolekit from the anaconda kickstart, a cluster dashboard for Kubernetes and support for SSH key authentication.
  • Fedora 23 Workstation brings a preview of GNOME 3.18 as well as changes to the Software application (allowing it to update firmware) and Wayland, with the latter enhancements aimed at helping to make Wayland the default graphic server for future releases.
  • Fedora 23 Cloud does not have any obvious improvements, but enhancements continue to deliver a more secure and flexible image for cloud-based deployments. Additionally, Fedora 23 Cloud is expected to power the forthcoming Fedora Atomic Host which is anticipated to have a two-week release cadence moving forward.