Fedora.next: Bringing change to a classic distro (without too much kicking and screaming)

As the Fedora Project reached our tenth birthday, we starting looking at how computing has changed since we started, and what we need to do to stay relevant, useful, and engaging. The IT world has become much more developer and application-centric, automation is everywhere, and cloud computing brings a whole new scale of operations (along with new privacy and security challenges). Personal computing is giving way to mobile. And Linux and open source are everywhere — in ways we only dreamed of a decade ago.

Fedora had an amazing and successful first decade, but as we looked forward, realized that we weren't ideally positioned to meet the challenges this new world brings. Our years of hard work created a polished, capable, and amazing traditional Linux distribution, but our user and contributor communities weren't growing.

After much soul-searching (a Fedora Project specialty!) on the mailing list and at our contributor conferences, we knew we had to make some changes. We also knew that we wanted to stay true to our core values — freedom, friends, features, and first — and we didn't want to turn back on the things we've gotten right. So, we worked on several initiatives under the umbrella term "Fedora.next".

This includes the separate Fedora Cloud, Fedora Workstation, and Fedora Server flavors, constructed to fit specific user bases and use cases in a way we've never done before. And it includes a more ambitious plan to decompose the thousands of packages in the Fedora repository into modular components in a "ring" structure. It also comes with a new governance model — the consensus-based and objective-oriented Fedora Council.

Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader, will talk about all of these things and about where we might be going next, and will answer your questions about anything and everything Fedora related.