Fedora 36 Beta is now available

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce Fedora Linux 36 Beta. This release continues the Fedora Project's emphasis on delivering leading-edge open source technologies and includes updates to GNOME, Wayland improvements for NVIDIA users, and more.

Desktop improvements

Fedora's desktop experience just gets better with each release. Fedora 36 Workstation Beta includes the newly released GNOME 42, the latest release of the GNOME desktop environment. 

Users who prefer "dark mode" interfaces will be happy to note that GNOME 42 has a dark mode option. GNOME also brings an updated GNOME Shell theme to use less space, improve contrast and otherwise make the user experience a little nicer. 

This release also brings a new terminal app (Console) and a new text editor called… Text Editor. We give the naming scheme full credit for descriptiveness, if not originality. The real attraction is in Text Editor's improved UI and features like auto-save to help prevent losing work, which wasn’t present in the previous default text editor. 

Users who need to take screenshots often will find the new screenshot features helpful. Tapping "print screen" now brings up an interactive tool to get a snapshot or recording of the whole screen or just a portion of it. 

Making snapshots easier

It might be easy to forget all the under-the-hood work that happens in Fedora that makes user-visible changes possible. Case in point, some work has gone into Fedora Linux 36 rpm-ostree desktop variants to move data to /var and make /var a separate subvolume so that it's easier to manage snapshots. 

In Fedora Linux 36, the RPM database is moving to /var from /usr. Why? Moving the RPM database from /var makes it easier for various types of snapshot and rollback operations. This work has been underway for a while for the Fedora variants using rpm-ostree, particularly Silverblue, Kinoite, CoreOS and IoT which already have snapshots and rollbacks. This background lifting helps lay the groundwork for standard Fedora releases to make use of those features as well. 

Users may not see the benefits immediately, but this work means that they can see it later. It's a prime example of how work starts upstream in Fedora, gets perfected over a few releases and then finds its way into day-to-day use and potentially downstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Other goodness in Fedora Linux 36 Beta

We know that Fedora Linux users like choice when it comes to desktop environments, so we're excited about the availability of the LXQt 1.0 release making its way to Fedora. You can grab the LXQt spin, or just install LXQt alongside your existing desktop environment. 

NVIDIA users will see additional Wayland support in Fedora 36 Beta, with GDM sessions now using Wayland by default. 

Of course, you'll find all kinds of programming language, library and utility updates like Ruby on Rails 7.0, Django 4.0, PHP 8.1, PostgreSQL 14 and plenty of other updates. Podman 4.0 also makes its debut in Fedora 36 Beta.

Testing help needed

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the test mailing list or in the #fedora-qa channel on Libera.chat. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F36 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug on Fedora Docs.

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the final release. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Bugs you find and report won't just help you, it can help improve the experience of millions of Fedora Linux users worldwide! 

Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can. Your feedback improves not only Fedora Linux, but the Linux ecosystem and free software as a whole.

More information

For more detailed information about what’s new on Fedora Linux 36 Beta release, you can consult the Fedora Linux 36 Change set. It contains more technical information about the new packages and improvements shipped with this release.