4. Changes in Fedora for Desktop Users
The GNOME Display Manager (GDM) in Fedora 22 will default to the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. While the default GNOME session still uses X, this change brings the move to Wayland one step closer.
Wayland is a compositing display server, using your computer's video hardware for rendering. On systems where Wayland will not run, GDM should transparently fall back to using the X backend.
If you need to disable Wayland for GDM, edit
/etc/gdm/custom.conf
to reflect the following:
[daemon]
WaylandEnable=false
GNOME has been updated to the latest upstream release 3.16. This release comes with a number of feature improvements, some of which are listed below.
The GNOME 3 notification system has been completely redesigned for 3.16. The message tray, used in previous versions of GNOME, was replaced with a new message list that the user can access from the GNOME Shell top bar.
GNOME Shell's calendar drop down has also been substantially changed to improve the overall user experience.
The list and grid views in the Files application have been improved so that they are easier to use.
The Activities overview, login screen and other parts of the GNOME Desktop come with an updated look.
The 3.16 release introduces a new style of scrollbars that are only shown when the pointer is moved. They change size when the user clicks on them.
The 3.16 release includes new games, gnome-2048 and gnome-taquin.
Support for codec, font, and MIME handler installation has been moved from gnome-packagekit to gnome-software. A new UI has been added to support these features.
The Plasma desktop in Fedora 22 is upgraded to version 5, which is based on Qt 5
and KDE Frameworks 5
. Plasma 5 has a new theme called Breeze, which offers cleaner visuals and better readability, improves certain workflows and provides a more consistent and polished interface overall. Users familiar with KDE Workspace 4 should have no problem adapting to the new environment. The environment has been migrated to a fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack based on OpenGL(ES)
.
Fedora 22 comes with an updated, improved version of the popular Xfce desktop environment. This new release introduces a number of bug fixes and enhancements to the desktop environment and its default applications.
Notable changes include:
The window switcher (Alt+Tab) now supports themes and live previews and has several different modes.
A Hidpi theme has been added for displays with high DPI.
The Panel is now extensible via Gtk3 plug-ins, and supports intelligent hiding.
The desktop has a new wallpaper settings dialog, per-workspace wallpaper support, and better multi-monitor handling.
Support has been added for the new libinput
input library.
Many improvements were made to the Thunar file manager, including tab support, bug fixes and performance enhancements.
The Mousepad text editor has been rewritten for better speed and simplicity.
The Parole media player has been ported to Gtk3 and has a new interface.
LXQt is the Qt port and the upcoming version of LXDE, the Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of the merge between the LXDE-Qt and the Razor-qt projects. Version 0.9.0 of this desktop environment is available in Fedora 22.
Like LXDE, this environment focuses on speed and low resource (CPU and RAM) consumption, making it especially suitable for systems with older or otherwise constrained hardware.
To install
LXQt, use the
dnf groupinstall lxqt
command, and then select this environment the next time you log in. For more information about the project, see the
LXQt official website. Also see the
LXQt 0.9 release announcement for detailed information about the 0.9.0 release.
Fedora 22 includes Qtile - a lightweight, extensible, tiling window manager written in Python. The available version is 0.9.1.
To install Qtile, use the dnf install qtile
command.
See the
project website for introduction, general information, documentation and screenshots, and the
release notes for information about recent changes.
4.3. Internationalization
The localization effort for Fedora packages has moved from Transifex into
Zanata. If you are interested in helping localize Fedora into your language, follow the instructions in the
Fedora Localization Guide.
ibus is an input method switching framework. It is used to switch beween input languages while logged into a desktop environment. Notable changes for ibus in Fedora 22 include:
A user's ibus input method engines will automatically load when loging into GNOME, allowing them to swith engines without waiting for them to load.
Input method engines are hidden on GNOME's lock screen.
KDE has a special panel icon for ibus. Behind the scenes, this is determined by the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
environment variable, and will use GtkStatusIcon for supporting desktops and the KDE icon for KDE. If you log in with methods such as startkde
instead of with a login manager, you may have to set this variable manually.
4.3.2. Unicode 7.0 Support in Glibc
An update to Glibc
locale data (character map, character width, and LC_CTYPE
information) in Fedora 22 enables support for Unicode 7.0. Previous Fedora releases supported Unicode 5.1. This change adds almost 8000 new characters, and also corrects Unicode data for some existing characters per the latest Unicode standard.
4.3.3. DNF Langpacks Plug-in
The DNF package manager, which replaces Yum in Fedora 22, now supports langpack installation through the dnf-langpacks plug-in. The functionality is the same as the yum-langpacks plug-in for Yum.
Currently, the plug-in can not install langpacks automatically due to a missing
DNF feature. See BZ#
1114422 for details. Manual installation is possible using the
dnf langinstall language
command, and a list of available languages can be obtained using
dnf langavailable
.
To display all available commands for dnf-langpacks, use the dnf --help
command. All listed commands beginning with lang*
are provided by this plug-in.
4.3.4. New Default Console Font
The default console font has been changed to eurlatgr
in Fedora 22. The new font has the same typeface as the previously used latarcyrheb-sun16
font, but supports a broader range of characters from the Latin and Greek alphabets as well as some commonly used symbols. Users should therefore notice less replacement characters displayed on the console when texts using non-ASCII characters are being displayed.
The eurlatgr
font does not support Arabic, Cyrillic and Hebrew characters; messages written in these alphabets will continue to use the latarcyrheb-sun16
font.
Full documentation detailing supported code pages and characters is available in the font's
README file.
4.3.6. Lohit2 Odia Font Update
Fedora 22 brings an update to the Lohit Odia font, which is the default font for the Odia language in Fedora.
This update aims at cleaning up Odia type tables and make them effective and efficient by following all the standards around font technology. It makes this font follow the latest open type specification and incorporates changes made in language guidelines in recent years.
Users should not notice any significant changes apart from some "rare" words now being displayed correctly.