According to the official release schedule of Fedora 28, which has received approval from the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), Fedora 28 should be released either on May 1, 2018, or a week after that.

To get there, Fedora developers want to start a mass rebuild of the distribution by the end of January. All software that is to be included in Fedora 28 should be translated by March 6, which is also the planned date of the Beta freeze.

Milestone freezes such as the beta freeze and final freeze typically happen two weeks before the public release of Fedora Beta and Final. But according to the official release schedule, the beta version of Fedora 28 will be released either on March 27 or April 3, extending the period between the beta freeze and its release to three weeks. This extra buffer should allow for more comprehensive testing and prevent the final release from being delayed.

Key Features and Changes in Fedora 28

Fedora developers plan to introduce many improvements in Fedora 28, and they want to start with the initial setup process.

“Currently there is a high level of redundancy between the Anaconda installer and gnome-initial-setup,” state Fedora developers on the corresponding Fedora Wiki page. More specifically, the developers want to remove the time and date, network configuration, user account creation, and root password creation spokes from Anaconda, and also get rid of the language and keyboard layout panels from gnome-initial-setup.

Fedora 28 is expected to be a great release for laptop users because it will enable various hardware power-saving features by default. Included among those features is the recent SATA link power management change by Red Hat’s Hans de Goede. This change benefits Haswell laptops and newer and results in a power use drop of around 1 watt.

If everything goes right, Fedora 28 could support Thunderbolt 3 security levels, which are an important security feature of this increasingly popular and highly versatile interface developed by Intel. With Thunderbolt 3 security levels, a Thunderbolt device can be restricted to access only a certain part of the system instead of enjoying wide access to other devices or memory.

Expected to ship with Fedora 28 is also Red Hat’s next-gen Linux storage framework, Stratis. lead developer Andy Grover describes the project in a white paper, “Stratis is a new tool that meets the needs of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users calling for an easily configured, tightly integrated solution for storage that works within the existing Red Hat storage management stack.” As such, Stratis could be the Btrfs replacement many Red Hat and Fedora users have been waiting ever since it became deprecated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8.

Other noteworthy new features and changes in Fedora 28 include the proposed integration of VirtualBox guest drivers for a smoother out-of-the-box experience when running Fedora in a virtual machine, the hardening of compiled Fedora packages by enabling certain security flags, or the upgrade to GCC 8, which should be released around March.

To see a full list of changes that have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 28 release, visit this wiki page.