New features in Fedora 22 Workstation.

Matthias Clasen recently posted some updates on the Fedora development list about new features in Fedora 22 Workstation. As you may know, we’re getting ready to issue an Alpha, so it’s a great time to try out these changes.

• Notifications have improved significantly in Fedora 22. The message tray no longer hides in the bottom, but is subsumed into the top bar. You can review them from the calendar popup. (Here are the original mockups.) Please try out the notifications with your favorite applications and report bugs if you find functional problems.
• The GNOME Shell theme has been refreshed.
• The login screen in Fedora 22 Workstation now runs over Wayland, but falls back to the standard Xorg server if something goes wrong. This is part of Fedora’s overall strategy of getting things running on Wayland early. Wayland as a session option was available in Fedora 21, but we are ultimately moving toward having it as the default in a future release. Note that the fallback calls Xorg in a slightly different way, so you may see bugs (and filing a bug report is welcome).
• The UI for installation of codecs, fonts, MIME types, and so on is now handled by GNOME Software. This change further enhances the sense of GNOME Software as a one-stop shop for installing things, which was a highly praised feature in Fedora 21.
• Nautilus has had multiple improvements, including more pleasant and logical context menus and controls (here are the designs).

Fedora 22 Alpha is scheduled to release on March 10. We hope you’ll give it a try, so you can test drive these new features. Those of you knowledgeable about Fedora 22 pre-releases can find early test candidate images for Alpha in the usual places. Please use Bugzilla to file helpful bug reports. If you need help filing a bug report, this wiki page may be useful.