If you’re already using Fedora, you can upgrade from the command line or use GNOME Software — upgrade instructions here. We’ve put a lot of work into making upgrades easy and fast. In most cases, this will take half an hour or so, bringing you right back to a working system with no hassle
Fedora 26 Minimum System Configuration
The figures below are a recommended minimum for the default installation. Your requirements may differ, and most applications will benefit from more than the minimum resources.
- 1GHz or faster processor
- 1GB System Memory
- 10GB unallocated drive space
What’s New in Fedora 26
LXQt Spin – fedora LXQt provides a lightweight, well-integrated LXQt desktop environment. In addition to LXQt itself, it provides a small, well-selected collection of applications, such as the QupZilla browser, which combines the rendering engine from Chromium with a nice Qt experience. As all applications use the same Qt5 toolkit and the Breeze theme known from KDE, the desktop provides a unified and well-integrated style and theme. In addition, breeze-gtk is provided to allow the user to integrate GTK applications too.
A lightweight, well-integrated LXQt desktop environment
Python Classroom Lab -A new Python Classroom Lab will be created in 3 variants: Workstation based, Docker based and Vagrant based. It’s an important step for our Fedora Loves Python initiative. The main audiences are Python teachers and workshop instructors.
SSSD fast cache for local users – Enable resolving all users through the sss NSS modules for better performance.
Kerberos KCM credential cache by default – Default to a new Kerberos credential cache type called KCM which is better suited for containerized environments and provides a better user experience in the general case as well.
GNOME 3.24 – The GNOME 3 desktop environment has been upgraded to GNOME 3.24. This new version includes a number of major new features and enhancements, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes such as the addition of Night Light that subtly changes the screen color according to the time of day, which can help to reduce sleeplessness if you use your computer at night.
Enable TRIM pass down to encrypted disks – Override kernel default for dm-crypt mappings of LUKS1 encrypted volumes via flag put in /etc/crypttab file. This change should affect only newly created encrypted storage based on LUKS1 format during installation.
Separate Subpackage and Source Debuginfo – Allow to install just the debuginfo for a subpackage and/or without the source files. The debuginfo packages are huge because they contain debuginfo and all sources for all subpackages. Being able to install only the debuginfo for the subpackage that is installed reduces the size that needs to be downloaded to analyze, trace, profile or debug a program or core file.
Ruby 2.4 – Ruby 2.4 is the latest stable version of Ruby. Many new features and improvements are included for the increasingly diverse and expanding demands for Ruby. With this major update from Ruby 2.3 in Fedora 24 to Ruby 2.4 in Fedora 26, Fedora becomes the superior Ruby development platform.
Python 3.6 – Update the Python 3 stack in Fedora from Python 3.5 to Python 3.6.
DNF 2.0 – DNF, Fedora’s package manager, has been rebased to version 2.0, which brings many bugfixes and improvements over DNF 1.x, as well as changes required to fix incompatibilities with Yum, the predecessor of DNF. This required the introduction of certain incompatibilities between DNF 2.0 and DNF 1.x. DNF 2.0 provides usability improvements, including better messages during resolution errors, showing whether a package was installed as a weak dependency, better handling of obsolete packages, fewer tracebacks, and others.
Modular Server Preview – Fedora 26 contains a “preview” release of a modular Fedora Server Edition. Fedora Modularity is attempting to disconnect the lifecycles of applications from each other and also from that of the operating system, while still maintaining the ease of use of a typical Linux distribution.
Anaconda Changes – A new, alternate partitioning interface provided by the blivet-gui tool is now available in the manual partitioning screen. The built-in help system, which was previously available in the graphical installation interface, has been extended to the text mode interface.
ARM Support in Fedora Media Writer
Fedora Media Writer has gained the ability to write ARM images to SD cards and other portable media. Users, including those on Windows and macOS as well as on Fedora, will now be able to write Fedora images easily for Raspberry Pi 2 and above and for other supported ARM devices.
GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) Rebased to 7.1 – The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been rebased to version 7.1, a major new release that provides a number of new features as well as many improvements and bugfixes.
Retire Synaptics Driver
xorg-x11-drv-synaptics has been the main X.Org touchpad driver for over a decade. Since Fedora 22, it has been superseded by xorg-x11-drv-libinput which aims to provide a better touchpad experience.
Conclusion
Fedora Workstation is built on GNOME (now version 3.24). If you’re interested in other popular desktop environments like KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, and more, check out Fedora Spins. Or, for versions of Fedora tailored to special use cases like Astronomy, Design, Security, or Robotics, see Fedora Labs. STEM teachers, take advantage of the new Python Classroom, which makes it a breeze to set up an instructional environment with Vagrant, Docker containers, a Live USB image, or traditional installation.