Rather than the full Five Things in Fedora This Week, I’ve just got one — as you may have seen by now, while we hoped to sign off on the Fedora 23 final release yesterday for availability next week, the quality assurance team found a number of issues that still needed to be addressed first. Fedora always releases on Tuesday (it makes the logistics a lot easier), so with the delay, the planned release date is now November 3rd, 2015.
This extra week will both give time to get fixes in place, and to make sure those are fully tested. (We wouldn’t want to give you a Fedora OS with rushed fixes which might be incomplete or even cause other problems.)
I know sometimes it feels like Fedora is always late, but this is really a misinterpretation of our process. Remember, rather than developing software entirely under our control, we integrate thousands of
components created and maintained in the wide open source world, and getting everything aligned and polished is a major feat. This makes a strict calendar-based release very difficult.
On the other hand, in order to keep Fedora moving fast (in line with our “First” foundation), we don’t want to entirely leave it to “we’ll release it when it’s ready” — with that approach, sometimes it’s never ready enough. So, we use a hybrid model. We have a target schedule, but at each milestone on the schedule, we evaluate based on release criteria, and adjust either the schedule or the feature set to match.
I’m as impatient as anyone to see Fedora 23 in your hands, but I am also very pleased with the Fedora Quality Assurance team’s commitment to giving you something we all can be completely proud of. The process we use helps ensure that — so, November release it is!
P..S. I’ll be back next week with an actual five things. See you then!
msx
Hi Matthew,
I believe this is the absolutely right decision, I’ve been running F23 since the Beta came out and so far despite the occasional bump it has been a fairly smooth sailing.
Great work and thank you.
Hakamy
Report from the beta user here: ISSUE: Latest GNOME update (3.18.1) broke GNOME Shell ability to display shadow.
Eduardo Silva
I have gnome 3.18.1 and still have window shadows, if that’s what you are speaking about.
Hbs
Not the window/application shadows. But the shell shadows.
msx
Same as Eduardo here when using Xorg, with Wayland there are some glitches though – nothing one couldn’t expect as there’s still ongoing work to fully support it.
melmeiro
Delaying the final release of Fedora OS and keeping a bunch of community does not always hurt. Having a full-fledged distribution with thousands of open-source community supported applications and resolving those conflicts while holding them together without any issue or conflict are the main outcomes why we as the community would prefer Fedora OS as the system we use daily. Those developers, I hope, will overcome those obstacles and release a distribution of happiness and beauty, instead of a mixture of errors and unresolved bugs. Besides, recent CPU architectures and graphic cards requiring proprietary drivers necessitate much more stability, and improvement in terms of performance and security, rather than short release cycles.
Paulo
On these delays if the community changes the date it is working to improve but I am very satisfied. Now to the community because ta problems is something else, Congratulations community!
Timothy M Butterworth
I would not mind if they push back until Plasma 5.5 is released and include the latest MESA stack as well.
Can we also please consider making a new Fedora build target focusing on Plasma Mobile for Google Nexus 5, 5X, 6, 6P, 7 and 7 2013 and Asus Transformer/Pad hardware. Fedora Mobile!
Matthew Miller
Mobile is a hard target, and that would be a huge amount of work. If we had many developers very interested in doing it and with a long term commitment, that would be one thing, but, really, we don’t. It’s better to devote our resources to areas where we’re likely to succeed.
However, if think I’m wrong and you’re interested in building it, you’re entirely welcome to work on a “Mobile Fedora Remix”. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix for details on how to do it.
Mogeni
Would like to see and feel Fedora Mobile. Can try it, Miller.
tr
Moar Fedora Mobile!