Fedora 28 beta is ready for you to test

Fedora 28 has just been released in its beta version. That means it isn’t likely to be completely free of bugs and that you have a chance to participate in ensuring that it’s ready to go public on May 1.

This news won’t be particularly surprising to the more enthusiastic Fedora users. Fedora’s release cycle is a fairly regular after all. Every six months, more or less, a new Fedora release is published. Many Fedora users have come to expect to see them around May Day and Halloween each year. Yet, while not surprising, the news is still exciting because of a number of new and enhanced features.

New features in Fedora 28 beta

So, what do you have to look forward to in this beta release or the planned May release?

• Inclusion of the Modularity initiative for Fedora 28 Server, which allows systems administrators to run multiple versions of the same software on a single stack without compromising system stability.
• Support for AArch64 (ARM) as a primary architecture for Fedora 28 Server, making it easier to run Fedora on alternative hardware architectures.
• GNOME 3.28 for Fedora 28 Workstation, bringing a host of quality-of-life improvements to desktop users and developers, including Thunderbolt 3 support, new power-saving features, and the ability to favorite files, folders, and contacts.

We’ve also got promise of:

• An extended battery life — maybe as much as 30 percent on laptop batteries
• Fewer questions to answer at setup time
• A user password that will be sufficient for working as root
• Less redundancy between the Anaconda installer and the GNOME initial setup
• Improved VirtualBox support with new guest drivers in the kernel package and VirtualBox Guest Additions
• The latest GNOME desktop environment
• Some snazzy new wallpapers

Other notable changes include:

• Secure Thunderbolt 3 support
• Users can type either emoji annotation or Unicode names on the same dialog
• Ruby 2.5
• GCC 8
• Django 2.0
• Erlang 20
• GHC 8.2
• Golang 1.10

You can download the Fedora 28 beta release today — use Fedora Media Writer to put it on a USB drive and test it on your system in live mode. 

More information and instructions are available for Fedora 28 workstation here.