Fedora 28 Beta Workstation Has Major Changes – Better Battery and Thunderbolt Support

Posted by Doug Dobbins at 10:53 am on April 12, 2018

The beta release for the Fedora 28 Linux distribution is now out to the public. The beta is apreview of new capabilities that will become generally available in May. Fedora is a community Linux distribution that is sponsored by Red Hat and is available in workstation, server and container-optimized editions.

Fedora has a six monthly release cycle. Which means there are two Fedora releases each year. These releases are usually timed around May Day (1st of May) and Halloween (31st October). However, Fedora has a history of not keeping up the release dates. So the release schedule is only tentative and the dates may change for all the phases.

What Makes It Better

Battery Life

Fedora 28 will deploy several tweaks on its own to provide improved battery life. As explained in a talk at FOSDEM 2018, Fedora 28 will have the following power management tweaks:

Enabling auto-suspend for Intel HDA codecs saves around 0.4 W
Enabling SATA ALPM by default saves up to 1.5 W
Enabling i915 Panel Self Refresh by default saves around 0.5 W

With these tweaks in place, some laptop models will see up to 30% of battery life improvements.

Reduced Initial Setup Redundancy

To make Fedora more beginner friendly, Fedora 28 Workstation will have fewer ‘questions’ to answer at the install time. There will be no root password anymore and the user password itself will be sufficient for the root actions, same as Ubuntu.

Improved VirtualBox support

Fedora 28 will see the addition of guest-drivers to the Fedora kernel package, packaging the userspace-tools (VirtualBox Guest Additions) and adding the VirtualBox Guest Additions package to the default package list for the Workstation product.

GNOME 3.28

Fedora 28 will also feature the latest version of GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.28. You can find the new features in GNOME 3.28 on its official website.