Today, the Fedora Project, a global community that works to help advance free and open source software, is pleased to announce the beta availability of Fedora 33, the latest version of the Fedora operating system. Fedora 33 Beta continues the Fedora Project’s emphasis on delivering editions, each designed to address specific use cases for modern developers and IT teams. In addition to Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server, Fedora 33 Beta also formally adds Fedora IoT as a supported edition!

Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server continue to provide open operating systems built to meet the needs of forward-looking developers and server projects. We also continue to foster the development of emerging Fedora editions including Fedora CoreOS and Fedora Silverblue to directly address cloud-native, containerized infrastructure and development.

Fedora 33 IoT Beta

Geared towards edge devices, Fedora IoT supports a range of hardware platforms based on x86_64 and aarch64, including Raspberry Pi and Pine64, with the intent of delivering a smaller footprint operating system for space- and compute-constrained environments. Based on ostree technology for safer updates and rollbacks, Fedora IoT also includes Platform AbstRaction for SECurity (PARSEC), an open source initiative that aims to provide a common, hardware-agnostic API for hardware security and cryptographic services.

Fedora 33 Workstation Beta

Fedora 33 Workstation is aimed at helping developers be more productive and efficient in an increasingly cloud-native applications world, and leans on GNOME 3.38 to help make this goal a reality. The latest version of the GNOME desktop environment adds a welcome tour after installation, helping new and experienced users alike understand the enhancements of GNOME 3.38, and it also delivers improved screen recording and multi-monitor support. Fedora 33 Workstation also adds:

  • Better thermal management and performance on Intel CPUs with the inclusion of thermald in default installations

  • Animated backgrounds (time-of-day slideshow with hue changes) by default for desktop users

Another significant change for all desktop variants of Fedora 33 Beta, including Workstation, is that BTRFS is now the default file system. This is a significant shift for our community, which has used ext file systems since the early days of Fedora Core 1. BTRFS offers compelling features for Fedora users, including transparent compression and copy-on-write. For Fedora 33, only the basic features of BTRFS will be delivered by default, but we aim to continue adding to these capabilities in future versions.

Test Fedora 33 Beta for yourself

As always, the Fedora Project team wants to hear from you – let us know about any bugs or problems that you encounter, as your feedback can help us improve Fedora 33. Common issues can be found on the Fedora 33 common bugs page (please read this on how to effectively report bugs).

If you are interested in becoming more involved with Fedora, we want you on our team! The Fedora Project is always looking for translators, testers, content creators, marketers, designers and so much more. Whatever your skill set, we would love to have you involved – find out more at http://whatcanidoforfedora.org/.

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored community project. For more information about Fedora, please visit the Fedora Project homepage.