Linux distribution: Fedora 33 appears with Btrfs as standard

The Linux distribution Fedora, sponsored by Red Hat, has been released in version 33 . The community is implementing a widely discussed change : Btrfs is used as the standard file system. Ext4 was previously used for this. Among other things, this is quite controversial in view of the previous activities of the main sponsor Red Hat, as the latter had ended support for Btrfs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

However, the community has prevailed in its decision and refers to the stability of the copy-on-write file system and its years of use by Facebook and Suse. Btrfs’ file system compression is only offered as an opt-in. In the future, this should also be used automatically.

Better IoT and ARM support

As a variant of the Linux distribution, there is an official IoT edition from Fedora. It relies on the so-called Platform Abstraction for Security. This is an open source interface that is supposed to offer hardware security and cryptographic operations on a platform-agnostic basis.

The free .Net Core on AArch64 can now be used for the ARM port of the distribution. According to the team, it has also improved support for Pine64 devices, Nvidia’s Jetson boards and Rockchip SoCs.

With Nano, without DNSSEC

For programming and development, Fedora provides the usual tool upgrades. These include Python 3.9, Ruby on Rails 6.0 and Perl 5.32. Another new feature is that Nano is now used as the standard editor instead of Vi. The latter is of course still available and usable as a package.

For name resolution, Fedora uses Systemd-Resolved, which has been used in Ubuntu for a long time . However, the Fedora team has decided to completely disable the use of DNSSEC due to possible compatibility problems with network hardware. In a comment we already described DNSSEC as a failure five years ago .

In its announcement, the team also points out possible problems in connection with the Boothole gap in Grub and certificates in the firmware of computers that have already been withdrawn. Under certain circumstances, this can mean that a start with activated Secure Boot is not possible. The system start without Secure Boot should still be possible. Further details can be found in the announcement and in the project wiki .