Fedora 43 and RPM 6.0, JPEG-XL wallpapers, and more…
While Fedora 42 is still in works, which is expected to release in April, Fedora 43 has been planned for major changes, such as adding support for RPM 6.0, wallpapers that are in the JPEG-XL format, and much more to come. Fedora 43 will feature the following big changes:
- Fedora 43, starting from that version, will use RPM 6.0 package manager, which will improve security across many aspects by introducing enforced signature checking for packages, OpenPGP key handling improvements, support for multiple signatures per package, automatic packag signing at build time, and signing with Sequoia-sq as an alternative to GnuPG.
- JPEG-XL will be used as a default for desktop wallpapers as these files come in smaller sizes than wallpapers that use the PNG format. This proposal was filed on March 10th, 2025, and remains to be seen if it’s going to be accepted.
- The GNU Gold linker from the binutils project will be deprecated to reduce the amount of legacy code as packages start to drop the GNU Gold linker in favor of better linkers.
- The Rust bindings for GTK3 will be deprecated because they are not maintained upstream. That was because gtk-rs-core version 0.19 and 0.20 have deprecated the compatibility bindings for version 0.18 and older.
- The lastlog2 module will be used as an alternative to the older lastlog module for last user login information, because the improved version contains a very important fix for the Year 2038 problem for programs that use dates as 32-bit time representations. It also provides a native library and a PAM module to allow applications to accurately track the last login date and time for a specific user.
However, not all proposals will be accepted, but we hope that the majority of them will be accepted. If positive feedback has been emerged, and if the above proposals are accepted, that will improve the user experience for Fedora 43 users, which will be released this fall.