Fedora is generally regarded as an “early adopter” among Linux distributions and is known for integrating pioneering features such as the Wayland protocol or the multimedia framework PipeWire at an early stage. Fedora 38 (download), which was released on April 18, 2023, is taking things a little more slowly and is expanding with new spins, i.e. derivatives with alternative desktop environments, and more Flatpak apps. At the same time, it lays the technical foundation for functions such as hard disk encryption with TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and UKIs (Unified Kernel Images) for a seamlessly signed boot process.
Most of the innovations that affect users in everyday life go back to the Gnome 44 desktop environment, which – unlike the competitor Ubuntu – delivers the main edition Fedora Workstation 38 unchanged. The Gnome developers have added a feature to the file selection dialog that the community has been longing for: the dialog now shows previews (thumbnails) so that you can find an image straight away, for example. However, this only applies to the GTK4 version of the file selection. Apps that still use GTK3 still don’t show a thumbnail.
There is now an area in the quick settings panel at the top of the screen that lists apps that are running in the background. What initially looks like a practical collecting station for tray icons, which the Gnome project banned from the user interface some time ago, turned out to be a confusing implementation in our test.
