On July 8, the Fedora Project lost Seth Vidal, a dedicated, tireless, and brilliant contributor. Seth was a lead developer of Yum and the Fedora update repository system. He worked to ensure that the technical and community infrastructure of Fedora worked well and consistently for users and contributors around the world. Seth touched the lives of hundreds of Fedora contributors directly and millions of others indirectly by improving the experience of using and updating Fedora.

The Fedora Project dedicates the Fedora 20 release to Seth and asks that you join us in remembering his generous spirit and incredible work that helped make Fedora what it is today. We miss you, Seth.

The Fedora 20 release coincides with Fedora's tenth anniversary. The first Fedora release (then called Fedora Core 1) came out on November 6, 2003. The Fedora Project community has grown into an active and vibrant one that produces a new version of this leading-edge, free and open source operating system around every six months.

The Fedora Project strives to provide the best desktop experiences possible for users, from desktop environment to application selection. We also produce nearly a dozen spins tailor-made for desktop users, hardware design, gaming, musicians, artists, and early classroom environments.

GNOME 3.10

Fedora 20 comes with GNOME 3.10, which has several new applications and features that will please GNOME-lovers. This release includes a new music application (gnome-music), a new maps application (gnome-maps), a revamp for the system status menu, and Zimbra support in Evolution.

KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.11

The Fedora KDE SIG has rebased to KDE 4.11 for Fedora 20. This release includes faster Nepomuk indexing, improvements to Kontact, KScreen integration in KWin, Metalink/HTTP support for KGet, and much more.

Spins

Spins are alternate versions of Fedora. In addition to various desktop environments for Fedora, spins are also available as tailored environments for various types of users via hand-picked application sets or customizations.

See all of the Fedora 20 Release Spins.

While Fedora has supported a number of hardware architectures over the years, x86/x86_64 has been the default for the majority of Fedora users and for the Linux community in general.

ARM, however, has been making massive strides. It already dominates the mobile market, is becoming a go-to platform for hobbyists and makers, and is showing enormous promise for the server market as well.

In keeping with Fedora's commitment to innovation, the Fedora community has been pushing to make ARM a primary architecture to satisfy the needs of users and developers targeting the ARM platform.

The Fedora 20 release continues the Fedora tradition of adopting and integrating leading edge technologies used in cloud computing. This release includes features that will make working with virtualization and cloud computing much easier.

First-Class Cloud Images

The Fedora Cloud SIG has been working hard to provide images that are well-suited for running as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack.

If you're using public or private cloud, you should grab one of the downloadable Cloud Images or find a supported EC2 image.

VM Snapshot UI with virt-manager

Taking VM snapshots is now much easier. Though qemu and libvirt have all the major pieces in place for performing safe VM snapshots/checkpoints, there isn't any simple, discoverable UI. This feature will track adding that UI to virt-manager and any other virt stack bits that need to be fixed/improved, including adding functionality to libvirt to support deleting and rebasing to external snapshots.

ARM on x86 with libvirt/virt-manager

You can now run ARM VMs on x86 hosts using standard libvirt tools: libvirt virsh, virt-manager and virt-install.

The Fedora 20 release includes all the packages you need to run Apache Hadoop 2.2.0. Hadoop is a widely used, increasingly complete big data platform with a strong, growing community and ecosystem. The Hadoop packages included with Fedora 20 will provide a foundation for immediate use of Hadoop and a base for the rest of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

As always, Fedora 20 includes new features and updated packages that will be of interest to all manner of developers.

WildFly 8

WildFly 8 is the next version of the application server previously known as JBoss Application Server. With WildFly 8, it's possible to run your Java EE 7 applications with unparalleled speed.

WildFly 8 boasts a optimized boot process that starts services concurrently to eliminate unnecessary waits and taps into the power of multi-core processors. At the same time, WildFly takes an aggressive approach to memory management and keeps its memory footprint exceptionally small compared to other JVMs.

Ruby on Rails 4.0

Ruby on Rails 4.0

This update supports Ruby on Rails developers by providing system-packaged Ruby on Rails of the latest version. Apart from that, Rails 4.0 also brings improved functionality, speed, security, and better modularization.

Sometimes it's not the big, new features that make a user's experience better; it's the little enhancements or long-awaited tricky features that really help make a new release the bee's knees.

NetworkManager Improvements

NetworkManager is getting several improvements in Fedora 20 that will be welcome additions for power users and system administrators.

Users will now be able to add, edit, delete, activate, and de-activate network connections via the nmcli command line tool, which will make life much easier for non-desktop uses of Fedora.

NetworkManager is also getting support for bonding interfaces and bridging interfaces. Bonding and bridging are used in many enterprise setups and are necessary for virtualization and fail-over scenarios.

No Default Sendmail, Syslog

In the interests of paring down services that are generally not used on desktop systems, Fedora 20 removes and replaces some services that many users find unnecessary from the Live Desktop DVD. They will remain available as installable packages for users who might need them.

The systemd journal now takes the place as the default logging solution for minimal and other selected installation methods, such as the Live Desktop DVD, having been tested and able to manage persistent logging in place of syslog.

Also, Sendmail will no longer be installed by default, as most Fedora installs have no need of a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA).

Fedora prides itself on bringing cutting-edge technologies to users of open source software around the world, and this release continues that tradition. No matter what you do, Fedora 20 has the tools you need to help you get things done.

A complete list with details of each new change is available here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet

You can start by downloading Fedora 20:

http://get.fedoraproject.org/

• If you are upgrading from a previous release of Fedora, refer to:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading

• Fedora now includes the FedUp utility to enable an easy upgrade to Fedora 20 from previous releases. See the FedUp page on the Fedora wiki for more information:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedUp

Documentation

Read the full release notes for Fedora 20, guides for several languages, and learn about known bugs and how to report new ones:

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/

• Fedora 20 common bugs are documented at:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F20_bugs

This page includes information on several known non-blocker bugs in Fedora 20, please be sure to read it before installing!

We hope that you're excited to have Fedora 20 in your hands and are looking forward to using it and exploring its new features and many improvements over Fedora 19. But that's not all! Fedora never stands still, we're always working towards a new and better release and sharing our work with the world. Want to be part of the fun? It's easy to get involved!

There are many ways to contribute to Fedora, even if it's just bug reporting. You can also help translate software and content, test and give feedback on software updates, write and edit documentation, design and do artwork, help with all sorts of promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit http://join.fedoraproject.org today!