Fedora 33 has been officially released. The operating system runs on GNOME 3.38 and uses btrfs as the default file system for the first time. The makers have also rolled out features for Fedora IoT.
Version 33 of Fedora Workstation has been officially released for all desktop users. The desktop variant uses the Gnome 3.38 gui that came out last month. New users of the operating system can use a new Tour app to get to know the OS. Furthermore, most of the changes in GNOME 3.38 are cosmetic in nature. For example, Fedora 33 also gains support for animated desktop backgrounds.
An important innovation in the OS is that Fedora now uses btrfs as the default file system. That was always ext4 since Fedora 11, but according to the developers, btrfs is better optimized for SSDs. The file system supports file compression, although that will be an opt-in feature.
Fedora 33 also ships with updated system library packages, such as Python 3.9, Ruby on Rails 6, and Perl 5.32. Users who prefer KDE over Gnome will see EarlyOOM enabled by default and nano is now the default editor on both gui’s.
The Fedora Project also warns users that secure boot can be disabled in certain cases, although the company says that only a small fraction of users have. The company refers to the recently discovered Boothole vulnerability in grub2 that allows secure boot to be bypassed. The certificate used to sign the Fedora boot loader will eventually be replaced by Boothole. That won’t happen until mid-next year for most users, but users running other operating systems or having certain firmware updates may already be affected. In that case, the developers recommend disabling secure boot until an update with a new certificate is available.
In addition to the desktop variant, Fedora 33 also brings a change to the iot component. Fedora 33 IoT, which recently gained Official Edition status, now receives support for Platform Abstraction for Security or Parsec, an API to help secure hardware. Fedora 33 is available for download at getfedora.org.