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4. Changes in Fedora for Desktop Users

4.1. Desktop

4.1.1. GDM on Wayland

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

4.1.2. GNOME

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.
For more information about the release, go read the GNOME 3.16 Release Notes at https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.16/.

4.1.3. KDE

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).

4.1.4. MATE

4.1.5. XFCE 4.12

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.
See the Xfce 4.12 Tour for a visual tour of new features, and the Xfce 4.12 Changelog for a full list of changes.

4.1.6. LXQt 0.9.0

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.

Note

If you are interested in LXQt, consider joining the Fedora Project's LXQt Special Interest Group.

4.1.7. Qtile

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.

4.1.8. Libinput used for input devices

Input devices in supporting environments, notably GNOME with Fedora Workstation and KDE, will use a new driver, libinput. The new driver replaces a variety of drivers, such as synaptics, enabling more consistent behavior across a variety of devices.
libinput improves support for multi-touch devices and software emulated buttons. The driver is implemented directly in wayland sessions, and in X sessions through the xorg-x11-drv-libinput wrapper.
Input devices will be configurable through GNOME Settings, KDE System Settings, xfce-settings, or xinput. Some niche features are not available via libinput, but the previous behavior can be restored by removing the xorg-x11-drv-libinput package, and ensuring the appropriate x11 driver packages, probably x11-drv-synaptics or xorg-x11-drv-evdev, are installed.
Note that xorg-x11-drv-libinput is only installed by default on new Fedora 22 installations, if you are upgrading and you want to use the new features provided by libinput, you can install the package manually: 
      # dnf install xorg-x11-drv-libinput
To learn about the features and behavior of libinput, refer to man libinput or http://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/pages.html

4.2. Networking

4.2.1. BIND

BIND has been updated to the latest major release 9.10. This release comes with new features, some of which are listed below.
  • New zone file format, "map", stores zone data in a format that can be mapped directly into memory, allowing significantly faster zone loading.
  • New tool "delv" (domain entity lookup and validation) with dig-like semantics for looking up DNS data and performing internal DNSSEC validation has been added.
  • New "prefetch" option improving the recursive resolver performance has been added.
  • Improved EDNS processing allowing better resolver performance.
  • Substantial improvements have been made in response-policy zone (RPZ) performance.
  • ACLs can now be specified based on geographic location using the MaxMind GeoIP databases.
  • The statistics channel can now provide data in JSON format as well as XML.
  • The new "in-view" zone option allows zone data to be shared between views, so that multiple views can serve the same zones authoritatively without storing multiple copies in memory.
  • Native PKCS#11 API has been added.
  • New tool "named-rrchecker" can be used to check the syntax of individual resource records.
  • New tool "dnssec-importkey" allows "offline" DNSSEC keys.
  • Network interfaces are re-scanned automatically whenever they change.
  • New "max-zone-ttl" option enforces maximum TTLs for zones.
  • Multiple DLZ databases can now be configured, and are searched in order to find one that can answer an incoming query.
  • "named-checkzone" and "named-compilezone" can now read journal files.
This release also includes feature changes, some of which are listed below.
  • The version 3 XML schema for the statistics channel, including new statistics and a flattened XML tree for faster parsing, is no longer optional.
  • The option "named" now listens on IPv6 as well as IPv4 interfaces by default.
  • The internal and export versions of the BIND libraries have been unified so that external library clients can use the same libraries as BIND itself.
  • The default setting for the -U option has been adjusted to improve performance.
  • Adaptive mutex locks are now used on systems which support them.
  • The option "rndc flushtree" now flushes matching records from the address database and bad cache as well as the DNS cache.
  • The isc_bitstring API is no longer used and has been removed from the libisc library.
  • The timestamps included in RRSIG records can now be read as integers indicating the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch, in addition to being read as formatted dates in YYYYMMDDHHMMSS format.
For more information about the release, go read the BIND 9.10 Release Notes at http://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.10.0-P2/RELEASE-NOTES-BIND-9.10.0-P2.txt.

4.3. Internationalization

Note

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.

4.3.1. Changes in ibus

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.
See the backward compatibility report for information about removed, changed and added characters.

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.

Note

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.

4.3.5. Minglish Input Method for the Marathi Language

A new input method, "Minglish", is available for the Marathi language in Fedora 22.
Minglish allows you to write Marathi text phonetically using an English keyboard layout, based on the English letter pronunciation. For example, the word अनिश is formed by typing anish, whereas normally you would have to type FniS using the traditional phonetic input method, or anisha using ITRANS.
To enable the new input method on your system, install the m17n-db package using DNF, and then select Minglish in your desktop environment or IBus input preferences.

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.
See http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html for additional information about changes made in the new version. The fonts are provided by the google-noto-sans-oriya-fonts and google-noto-sans-oriya-ui-fonts packages.