Fedora May Move to Project Atomic Distribution

Fedora 22 was different from other releases most significantly by the way it was distributed - namely in three purpose-designed editions. However, Paul Frields is floating another method for future Fedora releases. He suggest Fedora 23 or 24 may consist of "some combination of a strongly managed center, curated stacks, and an expanding nebula of containers."

Paul Frields, Fedora Engineering Team Manager, today blogged that he and his colleagues have been discussing the direction of future Fedora releases. Frields thoughts take Fedora in a Project Atomic direction. "Atomic makes shipping an integrated, validated set of content easier. That content still comes from the packages we know well — kernel, glibc, bash, and others. But the rpm-ostree basis of Atomic can prevent slew in an installed system."

Frields appears to be hoping to simplify updates and minimize users' problems confronting bugs and update breakage. One of the main advantages would be the ability to back out of an update and restore a previous snapshot or stack of applications. He's currently pondering an enhanced rpm-ostree or perhaps something of a sandbox concept but the main idea is to divide the system into a small central core, supporting stacks and "a nebula of containers."

Frields says he'd like to roll out a prototype by Fedora 23 and have it a part of Fedora 24. He suggests they're likely to keep producing the traditional live and/or installation images for a while, but things are fixing to get real interesting in Fedora circles.

Elsewhere, openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio announced today that Tumbleweed will be moving on to GNOME 3.16 and KDE 5 by the end of the month. Evolve OS is requesting help in coming up with a new name because of trademark disputes. And The Document Foundation today announced the immediate availability of LibreOffice 4.4.2.