Fedora project announced the release of Fedora 33 for all desktop flavors and servers. The download links and torrents are immediately available for you.
Coming after 6 months from the earlier Fedora 32, the latest Fedora 33 distribution is supported until December 2021 with bug fixes and security updates. With this release, Fedora brings all of its desktop spins to their respective latest versions. Fedora releases two versions in a year and Fedora 33 is the last version of 2020.
If you are wondering, why Fedora? Well, if you are a power user, or a developer looking for all dev tools packed out of the box and a stable non-Ubuntu/Debian distro, Fedora is for you. And of course, it comes with all popular desktop environments such as KDE Plasma, XFCE, LxQT, and more as spins.
Fedora has a history of release delays. And fortunately, Fedora 33 released on time as there are no blocker bugs out there. With that said, let’s take a look at what’s new in Fedora 33.
Fedora 33 – New Features
Btrfs file system now defaults while installing Fedora via Anaconda installer. This is made as default for all desktop flavors of Fedora 33. The btrfs file system brings transparent file system compression, better data integrity, performance boost, and many more.
EarlyOOM is now enabled in Fedora KDE spin. This was enabled by default in Fedora 32. This feature saves you from the system hangs when you ran out of memory. For example, when enabled, early issues signal to Kernel to terminate processes based on a score which it assigns when RAM and swap go below 5% or 10%.
The default workstation edition of Fedora 33 features the latest GNOME 3.38 as a desktop environment. GNOME 3.38 brings a huge list of new features. For example, you can now customize the application menu with drag and drop icons. That is extended to the folder groups as well. GNOME 3.38 also features new applications such as LibreOffice 7.0, Thunderbird 78.0. It also brings features such as sharing of WiFi via QR code, fingerprint login, parental control for apps, and of course the native GNOME application updates.
Fedora generally provides the complete GNOME flavor while Ubuntu and other distro provides a strip down and customize version of GNOME. So, if you like to explore GNOME 3.38 to the fullest, you should try Fedora 33 workstation GNOME edition.
Fedora IoT is an official distribution now with Fedora 33. Fedora IoT is an internet-of-things distribution for IoT ecosystems. You can use this for IoT projects, industrial works, etc.
The default text editor is changed. Now Fedora 33 uses nano as the default text editor. Because nano doesn’t require any special knowledge to use.
The GNU C Library version is updated. Fedora 33 features the glibc version 2.32.
Fedora comes with Java Runtime environment pre-installed via OpenJDK. The Java version is updated with java-11-openjdk.
Python 3.9 is provided by Fedora 33 from earlier Python 3.8. Also with this release, Python 2.6 support is completely removed.
Better Thermal management is achieved in this release for the Workstation spins. The default install will include tharmald (Thermal Daemon) for Intel CPUs which manages the peak temperature and performance.
Read the entire changelog here.
Download Fedora 33
Fedora 33 Workstation, Server, and associated flavors are immediately available for download. Being in the release day, some of the mirrors are still syncing.
I have added the direct download links below for your reference.
Mirror
https://nrt.edge.kernel.org/fedora-buffet/fedora/linux/releases/33/
Upgrade from Fedora 32
Refer the detailed upgrade steps below.
Fedora 33 is a good release considering the tool-set updates and GNOME 3.38. The development work already underway for next Fedora 34 which is going to be another milestone release from the Fedora project. Fedora 34 is slotted for release around Q2 2021.
References
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/33/ChangeSet
