What’s new in Fedora 24 Workstation

Fedora 24 Workstation is the latest release of our free, leading-edge operating system. You can download it from the official website here. There are several new and noteworthy changes in Fedora Workstation.

GNOME 3.20

The default environment comes courtesy of the GNOME community. They’ve put a lot of work into the latest 3.20 release, with many improvements. Some examples:

  • New shortcut overlays now help users learn keyboard shortcuts for commands.
  • Searching is easier than ever in the Files application.
  • You can now access media controls directly from the calendar in Shell.
  • The default font Cantarell is now more legible.
  • Printer jobs are easier to manage with a simpler interface.
  • Mouse settings are now customized to show you the right options for your hardware.

There are many other improvements. Read more about them in the GNOME 3.20 press release.

Graphical upgrades

The Software application now has the ability to detect and offer upgrades to the latest Fedora release. This feature will soon be updated in Fedora 23, allowing users to upgrade to Fedora 24. Your content downloads in the background, and when ready, you can reboot and upgrade. As always, mixing software from non-Fedora sources may affect your ability to upgrade. Most systems can upgrade without issues, though.

Flatpak support

Flatpak provides a new way to package apps for Linux systems. Flatpaks are more secure, and don’t depend on what’s installed already in your system. Developers and vendors can offer Flatpaks that run on any Flatpak-capable Linux system. This makes life simpler for them and their users. The flatpak tool was available in previous releases of Fedora as xdg-app. In Fedora 24, the Software app will be able to show Flatpaks you have installed. GNOME already provides a repository with Flatpaks, and other upstream projects will soon.

LibreOffice 5.1

No Fedora Workstation release would be complete without the latest popular office suite. In Fedora 24, LibreOffice comes with many improvements across all its apps:

  • More compatibility with document formats
  • Imports Gnumeric, Microsoft Write (.wri), and Apple Keynote 6 documents
  • Improved export and import filters for OOXML, MS Visio, and Corel Draw files
  • Better user interface, and reorganzed main menu in Writer, Calc, and Impress
  • Uses GTK+ 3 toolkit by default, to look more like a native app
  • Runs natively on Wayland

QGnomePlatform

When apps look as similar as possible, they’re easier to use. Ideally, whether apps are designed for GNOME or KDE, they’d look the same. But different toolkits, such as Qt for KDE, need extra theme information to look like they’re part of the same environment. Contributors have been working to solve this issue for a while now. QGnomePlatform is a new project that helps by synchronizing settings between GNOME and newer Qt tools. Now when you change font settings in GNOME Tweak Tool, the change shows up in Qt-5 based applications, too. QGnomePlatform plans to grow over time to sync other settings.

Wayland

Wayland is the new display technology that replaces X. Now it’s ready for daily use in Fedora 24. To use it now, select the user at the login screen, then on the password screen select the gear-shaped settings icon to choose the session type. There’s already improved multi-monitor support and tear-free video playback in Wayland. It also features better security since applications no longer can “peek” at each other’s data. Currently Wayland is expected to be default in Fedora 25 Workstation.

Other notes

These are only some of the improvements in Fedora 24. Fedora is made up of thousands of software apps contributed by our community. Many of them have been updated since the previous release as well.

Want to read more about the Fedora 24 release? We’ve got you covered. Check out the official release announcement for more details.

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10 Comments

  1. “Wayland is the new display technology that replaces X. Now it’s ready for daily use in Fedora 24.”

    Simply.. incredible!
    Thanks a lot 😀

  2. Mirolim

    Great update! Thank you

  3. Ng. Linh

    nice, thank you for the update.

  4. florida

    “Certainly, an innovation with a great foresight in mind! Well done!”

  5. pam

    Been using fedora for the last 6 months and am dumbfounded month after month. Love gnome and fedora.
    As a 15 year linux user the last time I actually used fedora was fedora 10, the first being fedora core 2.

    Getting my pi 3 next month for a mini gimp, inkscape, darktable workstation…hope to install fedora.

    Cheers!

  6. congrate to fedora team n all of its users. I respect fedora cuz of its productivity thanks u
    Im downloading… 🙂

  7. VK Joseph

    Upgrade to Fedora 24 was very smooth. Excellent job.

  8. Awesome. good effort.

  9. Shawn

    “There’s already improved multi-monitor support and tear-free video playback in Wayland”

    Being on a HiDPI laptop, it’s really tough to use Wayland without MultiDPI support. Is that hidden anywhere in F24?

    Apart from that, the release seems very solid.

  10. Richard Branches

    What did Gnome or Fedora do with the font? It looks awful, I loved it before, now it looks transparent, I always set the interface font to size 9 because it’s too big at 11, also I installed freetype-world thinking it would improve it but no, it still look the same way, it’s not bold like in previous versions… How can I fix it?? please someone help me because I don’t like it at all.

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