Changes in Fedora 43 For Desktop Users

The GNOME X11 session has been removed from Fedora Linux. Users previously using GNOME on X11 will be transparently upgraded to the GNOME Wayland session. X11 applications are still supported on GNOME.

In previous Fedora releases, monospace fonts were implicitly substituted with sans-serif fonts by default configuration file in fontconfig if missing, which was the case for some languages. This could result in unpredictable behavior once additional font packages were installed. Fedora 43 fixes this by assigning a tentative default monospace font for languages that were previously missing it.

If you were relying on old behavior, you can use fonts-tweak-tool to specify the default monospace font for a certain language.

gdk-pixbuf2 now depends on Glycin, the sandboxed image loading framework, which greatly improves security. The intent is to provide the same user experience as before, but much has changed behind the scenes. All built-in pixbuf loaders have been removed in favor of the Glycin pixbuf loader. Most external pixbuf loaders are now obsolete, as Glycin supports the same image formats.

Accordingly, avif-pixbuf-loader from libavif, heif-pixbuf-loader from libheif, jxl-pixbuf-loader from libjxl, rsvg-pixbuf-loader from librsvg, and the standalone package webp-pixbuf-loader have all been removed from the distribution. Additionally, gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer has been removed in favor of glycin-thumbnailer. libvaif, libjxl, and librsvg no longer provide thumbnailers, since they depend on gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer. libheif still provides its own standalone thumbnailer, although it is redundant with the Glycin thumbnailer.

Noto Color Emoji fonts in Fedora now contain use the the COLRv1 format. The COLRv1 format is a color scalable font compared with the previous color bitmap fonts.

Users should not notice any changes except for a smaller file size.