This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Interview with Máirín Duffy
FAS ID: duffy
Matrix Rooms: My long-term home has been Fedora Design, but I also hang out in Podman, Fedora Marketing, and Fedora AI/ML.
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I have used Fedora as my daily driver since 2003 and have actively contributed to Fedora since 2004. (Example: I designed the current Fedora logo and website design.) I am very passionate about the open source approach to technology. I first started using Linux as a high school student (my first Linux was Red Hat 5.1) and being able to use free software tools like Gimp when I couldn’t afford Photoshop made an outsized impact on my life. (I explain my background in Linux and open source in-depth in this interview with Malcolm Gladwell: https://youtu.be/SkXgG6ksKTA?si=RMXNzyzH9Tr6AuwN )
Technology has an increasingly large impact over society. We should have agency over the technology that impacts our lives. Open source is how we provide that agency. We’re now in a time period with a new disruptive technology (generative AI) that – regardless if you think it is real or not, is having real impact on computing. Fedora and other open source projects need to be able to provide the benefits of this new technology, the open source way and using open source software. Small, local models that are easy for our users to deploy on their own systems using open source tooling will provide them the ability to benefit AI’s strengths without having to sacrifice the privacy of their data.
There is a lot of hype around AI, and a lot of very legitimate concerns around its usage including the intellectual property concerns of the pre-trained data, not having enough visibility into what data is part of pre-trained data sets, the working conditions under which some of the data is labeled under, the environmental impact of the training process, the ethics of its usage. Open source projects in particular are getting pummeled by scraping bots hungry to feed coding models. There are folks in the tech industry who share these legitimate concerns that prefer to avoid AI and hope that it the bubble will just pop and it will go away. This strategy carries significant risks, however, and we need a more proactive approach. The technology has legitimate uses and the hype is masking them. When the hype dies down, and the real value of this new technology is more visible, it will be important for the type of community members we have in Fedora with their commitment to open source principles and genuinely helping people to have had a seat at the table to shape this technology.
In the past I have been quite skeptical about generative AI and worried about its implications for open source. (I continue to be skeptical and annoyed by the hype surrounding it.) I’ve spent the past couple of years looking at open source licensed models and building open source generative AI tooling – getting hands on, deep experience to understand it – and as a result I have seen first hand the parts of this technology that have real value. I want FESCo to be able to make informed decisions when AI issues come up.
My background is in user experience engineering, and I am so excited about what this technology will mean for improving usability and accessibility for users of open source software. For example, we never have enough funding or interest to solve serious a11y problems; now we could generate text summaries of images & describe the screen out loud with high-quality audio from text-to-voice models for low vision users! I want open source to benefit from these and even more possibilities to reach and help more people so they can enjoy software freedom as well.
I have served in multiple governance roles in Fedora including time on the Fedora Council, the Mindshare Committee, lead of various Fedora Outreachy rounds (I have mentored dozens of interns in Fedora), and founder / lead of the Design team over many years. More importantly, I have deep Linux OS expertise, I have deep expertise in user experience, and I have a depth in AI technology to offer to FESCo. I believe my background and skills will enable FESCo to make responsible decisions in the best interest of open source and user agency, particularly around the usage of AI in Fedora and in the Fedora community. We will absolutely need to make decisions as a governing group in the AI space, and they should be informed by that specific expertise.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
I founded and ran the Fedora Design Team for 17 years. It was the first major Linux distribution community-lead design team, and often as a team we’ve been asked by other distros and open source projects for help (so we expanded to call ourselves the “Community Design Team.”) Over the years I’ve designed the user experience and user interfaces for many components in Fedora including our background wallpapers, anaconda, virt-manager, the GNOME font-chooser, and a bunch of other stuff. I moved on from the Fedora Design role to lead design for Podman Desktop and to work more with the Podman team (who are also part of the Fedora community) for a couple of years, and I also led the InstructLab open source LLM fine-tuning project and corresponding Linux product from Red Hat (RHEL AI.) For the past year or so I have returned to working on core Linux on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed team, and my focus is on building AI enhancements to the Linux user experience. My team is part of the Fedora AI/ML SIG and we’re working on packaging user-facing components and tooling for AI/ML for Fedora, so folks who would like to work with LLMs can do so and the libraries and tools they need will be available. This includes building and packaging the linux-mcp-server and packaging goose, a popular open source AI agent, and all of their dependencies.
My career has focused on benefiting Fedora users by improving the user experience of using open source technology, and being collaborative and inclusive while doing so.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
Data is the best way to handle disagreements when working as part of a team. Opinions are wonderful and everyone has them, but decisions are based made with real data. Qualitative data is just as important as quantitative data, by the way. That can be gathered by talking directly to the people most impacted by the decision (not necessarily those who are loudest about it) and learning their perspective. Then informing the decision at hand with that perspective.
A methodology I like to follow in the face of disagreements is “disagree and let’s see.” (This was coined by Molly Graham, a leadership expert.) A decision has to be made, so let’s treat it like an experiment. I’ll agree to run an experiment, and track the results (“let’s see”) and advocate for a pivot if it turns out that the results point to another way (and quickly.) Being responsible to track the decision and its outcomes and bringing it back to the table, over time, helps build trust in teams like FESCo so folks who disagree know that if the decision ended up being the wrong one, that it can and will be revisited based on actual outcomes.
Another framework I like to use in disagreements is called 10-10-10, created by Suzy Welch. It involves thinking through: how will this decision matter in 10 minutes? How about 10 months? How about 10 years? This frame of thought can diffuse some of the chargedness of disagreement when all of the involved people realize the short or long term nature of the issue together at the same time.
Acknowledging legitimate concerns and facing them head on instead of questioning or sidelining others’ lived experience and sincerely-held beliefs and perspectives is also incredibly important. Listening and building bridges between community members with different perspectives, and aligning them to the overall projects goals – which we all have in common as we work in this community – is really helpful to help folks look above the fray and be a little more open-minded.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
I understand there is a campaign against my running for FESCo because myself and a colleague wrote an article that walked through real, undoctored debugging sessions with a locally-hosted, open source model in order to demonstrate the linux-mcp-server project.
I want to make it clear that I believe any AI enhancements that are considered for Fedora need a simple opt-in button, and no AI-based solutions should be the default. (I’ve spoken about this before, recently on the Destination Linux Podcast: https://youtu.be/EJZkJi8qF-M?t=3020) The user base of Fedora and other open source operating systems come to their usage in part due to wanting agency over the technology they use and having ownership and control over their data. The privacy-focused aspects of Fedora have spanned the project’s existence and that must be respected. We cannot ignore AI completely, but we must engage with it thoughtfully and in a way that is respectful of our contributors and user base.
To that end, should you elect to grant me the privilege of a seat to FESCo this term:
I intend to vote in opposition to proposals that involve bundling proprietary model weights in Fedora.
I intend to vote in opposition to proposals that involve sending Fedora user data to third party AI services.
I intend to vote in opposition to proposals to turn AI-powered features on by default in any Fedora release.
I intend to vote in favor of proposals to enact AI scraper mitigation strategies and to partner with other open source projects to fight this nuisance.
My core software engineering background is in user experience and usability, and I believe in the potential of small, local models to improve our experience with software without compromising our privacy and agency. I welcome ongoing community input on these principles and other boundaries you’d like to see around emerging technologies in Fedora.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I want to be a member of FESCo to represent the interests of users, developers and maintainers of what we call Atomic, Bootable Container, Image Based or Immutable variants of Fedora (CoreOS, Atomic Desktops, IoT, bootc, etc.).
I think that what we can build around those variants of Fedora is the best path forward for broader adoption of Fedora and Linux in the general public and not just in developer circles.
I thus want to push for better consideration of the challenges specific to Atomic systems in all parts of Fedora: change process, infrastructure, release engineering, etc.
I also want to act as a bridge with other important communities built around this ecosystem such as Flathub, downstream projects such as Universal Blue, Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, and other distributions such as Flatcar Linux, GNOME OS, KDE Linux, openSUSE MicroOS, Aeon or ParticleOS.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
I primarily contribute to Fedora as a maintainer for the Fedora Atomic Desktops and Fedora CoreOS. I am also part of the KDE SIG and involved in the Bootable Containers (bootc) initiative.
My contributions are focused on making sure that those systems become the most reliable platform for users, developers and contributors. This includes both day to day maintenance work, development such as enabling safe bootloader updates or automatic system updates and coordination of changes across Fedora (switching to zstd compressed initrds as an example).
While my focus is on the Atomic variants of Fedora, I also make sure that the improvements I work on benefit the entire Fedora project as much as possible.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
Disagreements are a normal part of the course of a discussion. It’s important to give the time to everyone involved to express their positions and share their context. Limiting the scope of a change or splitting it into multiple phases may also help.
Reaching a consensus should always be the preferred route but sometimes this does not happen organically. Thus we have to be careful to not let disagreements linger on unresolved and a vote is often needed to reach a final decision. Not everyone may agree with the outcome of the vote but it’s OK, we respect it and move on.
Most decisions are not set in stone indefinitely and it’s possible to revisit one if the circumstances changed. A change being denied at one point may be accepted later when improved or clarified.
This is mostly how the current Fedora Change process works and I think it’s one of the strength of the Fedora community.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
I’ve been a long time Fedora user. I started contributing more around 2018 and joined Red Hat in 2020 where I’ve been working on systems such as Fedora CoreOS and RHEL CoreOS as part of OpenShift. I am also part of other open source communities such as Flathub and KDE and I am committed to the upstream first, open source and community decided principles.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Interview with Daniel Mellado
FAS ID: dmellado
Matrix Rooms: #ebpf, #fedora-devel, #rust, #fedora-releng, and a lot of #fedora-*
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I accepted this nomination because I believe FESCo would benefit from fresh perspectives, and I think that these new perspectives will also help to lower the entrance barriers for Fedora.
Governance bodies stay healthy when they welcome new voices alongside experienced members, and I want to be part of that renewal.
Technologies like eBPF are redefining what’s possible in Linux–observability, security, networking–but they also bring packaging challenges that we haven’t fully solved, such as kernel version dependencies, CO-RE relocations, BTF requirements, and SELinux implications.
On FESCo, I want to help Fedora stay ahead of these challenges rather than merely reacting to them. I want to advocate for tooling and guidelines that will help make complex kernel-dependent software easier to package.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
I founded and currently lead the Fedora eBPF Special Interest Group. Our goal is to make eBPF a first-class citizen in Fedora, improving the experience for the developers who are building observability, security, and networking tools and figuring out how to package software that has deep kernel dependencies.
On the packaging side, I maintain bpfman (an eBPF program manager) and several Rust crates that support eBPF and container tooling. I’ve also learned the hard way that Rust dependency vendoring is… an adventure.
Before Fedora, I spent years in the OpenStack community. I served as PTL (Project Team Lead) for the Kuryr project, the bridge between container and OpenStack networking and was active in the Kubernetes SIG. That experience taught me a lot about running open source projects: building consensus across companies, mentoring contributors, managing release cycles, and navigating the politics of large upstream communities.
I try to bring that same upstream, community-first mindset to Fedora. My hope is that the patterns we establish in the eBPF SIG become useful templates for other packagers facing similar challenges.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
I start by assuming good intent. If someone is in the discussion, it’s because they do also care about the outcome, even though they may have another point of view.
I also try not to speculate about why someone holds a particular view. Assigning motives derails technical conversations fast. Instead, I focus on keeping things facts-driven: what does the code actually do, what do users need, what are the real constraints? Egos don’t ship software, and sticking to concrete data keeps discussions productive.
When disagreements persist, I find it helps to identify what everyone does agree on and use that as a new starting point. You’d be surprised how often this unblocks a stalled conversation.
Also, I think that it’s important to step back. It’s tempting to want the final word, but that can drag things on forever without real progress. Miscommunication happens and not every discussion needs a winner.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
I believe in Fedora’s Four Foundations: Freedom, Friends, Features, First. What draws me to this community is the “Friends” part: there’s a place in Fedora for anyone who wants to help, regardless of background or technical skill level. Open source is at its best when it’s genuinely welcoming, and I want FESCo to reflect that.
From my time in the OpenStack community, I learned that healthy projects focus on protecting, empowering, and promoting: protecting the open development process and the values that make the community work; empowering contributors to do great work without painful barriers; and promoting not just the software, but the people who build and use it. I try to bring that mindset to everything I do.
I also believe strongly in working upstream. The changes we make should benefit not just Fedora users, but the broader open source ecosystem. When we solve a hard problem here, that knowledge should flow back to upstream projects and other distributions.
I’ll be at FOSDEM 2026. FOSDEM embodies what I love about open source: a non-commercial space where communities meet to share knowledge freely. If you’re there, come say hi.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Interview with Kevin Fenzi
FAS ID: kevin
Matrix Rooms: I’m probibly most active in the following rooms. I’m available and answer notifications and watch many other channels as well, but those 3 are the most active for me:
noc -> day to day infra stuff, handling alerts, talking with other infra folks
admin -> answering questions, helping fix issues, some team discussions
releng -> release engineering team discussions, answering questions, handling issues, etc.
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I think I still provide useful historical information as well as being able to pull on that long history to know when things are good/bad/have been tried before and have lessons to teach us.
Based on the proposals we approve or reject we can steer things from FESCo. I do think we should be deliberate, try and reach consensus and accept any input we can get to try to come to good decisions. Sometimes things won’t work out that way, but it should really be the exception instead of the rule.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
I’m lucky to be paid by Red Hat to work on infrastucture, I like to hope it’s useful to the community In my spare time I work on packages, answering questions where I can, unblocking people, release engineering work, matrix and lists moderation.
I really hope my contributions contribute to a happier and more productive community.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
I try and reach consensus where possible. Sometimes that means taking more time or involving more people, but If it can be reached I think it’s really the best way to go.
Sometimes of course you cannot reach a consensus and someone has to make a call. If thats something I am heavily involved in/in charge of, I do so. I’m happy that we have a council as a override of last resort in case folks want to appeal some particularly acromonious decision. Also, as part of a team you have to sometimes delegate something to someone and trust their judgement in how it’s done.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
I think there’s been a number of big debates recently and probibly more to come. We need to remember we are all friends and try and see things from other people’s point of view.
My hero these days seems to be treebeard: “Don’t be hasty”
My matrix/email is always open for questions from anyone…
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Interview with Fabio Alessandro Locati
FAS ID: fale
Matrix Rooms: I can be easily found in #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org, #bootc:fedoraproject.org, #coreos:fedoraproject.org, #devel:fedoraproject.org, #epel:fedoraproject.org, #event-devconf-cz:fedoraproject.org, #fedora:fedoraproject.org, #fedora-arm:matrix.org, #fedora-forgejo:fedoraproject.org, #fosdem:fedoraproject.org, #flock:fedoraproject.org, #golang:fedoraproject.org, #iot:fedoraproject.org, #meeting:fedoraproject.org, #meeting-1:fedoraproject.org, #mobility:fedoraproject.org, #python:fedoraproject.org, #rust:fedoraproject.org, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org, #sway:fedoraproject.org, #websites:fedoraproject.org
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I have been part of the Fedora community for many years now: my FAS account dates back to January 2010 (over 15 years ago!), and I’ve contributed in many different roles to the Fedora project. I started as an ambassador, then became a packager and packaging mentor, and joined multiple SIGs, including Golang, Sway, and Atomic Desktop. For many years, I’ve been interested in immutable Linux desktops, Mobile Linux, and packaging challenges for “new” languages (such as Go), which are also becoming more relevant in the Fedora community now. Having contributed to the Fedora Project for a long time in many different areas, and given my experience and interest in other projects, I can bring those perspectives to FESCo.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
Currently, many of my contributions fall in the packaging area: I keep updating the packages I administer and exploring different solutions for packaging new languages and maintaining the Sway artifacts. My current contributions are important to keeping Fedora first, not only in terms of package versions but also in terms of best practices and ways to reach our users.
Additionally, I served for the last two cycles (F41/F42) as a FESCo member, steering the community toward engineering decisions that were both sensible in the short and long term.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
I think disagreements are normal in communities. I have a few beliefs that guide me in entering and during any disagreement:
I always separate the person from their argument: this allows me to discuss the topic without being influenced by the person making the points.
I always keep in mind during disagreements that all people involved probably have a lot of things they agree on and a few they don’t agree on (otherwise, they would not be part of the conversation in the first place): this allows me to always see the two sides of the disagreement as having way more in common than in disagreement.
During a discussion, I always hold the belief that the people arguing on the opposite side of the disagreement are trying to make sure that what they believe is right becomes a reality: this allows me always to try to see if there are aspects in their point of view that I had not considered or not appropriately weighted.
Thanks to my beliefs, I always manage to keep disagreements civil and productive, which often leads to a consensus. It is not always possible to agree on everything, but it is always possible to disagree in a civil, productive way.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
Let’s start with the fact that I’m a Red Hat employee, though what I do in my day job has nothing to do with Fedora (I’m an Ansible specialist, so I have nothing to do with RHEL either), so I have no ulterior motives for my contributions. I use Fedora on many devices (starting from my laptop) and have done so for many years. I contribute to the Fedora Project because I found in it and its community the best way to create the best operating system :).
I’ve been using Sway exclusively on my Fedora desktop since I brought it into Fedora in 2016. On the other systems, I use either Fedora Server, Fedora CoreOS, or Fedora IoT, even though lately, I prefer the latter for all new non-desktop systems.
I see the Fedora Community as one community within a sea of communities (upstream, downstream, similarly located ones, etc.). I think the only way for all those communities to be successful is to collaborate, creating a higher-level community where open-source communities collaborate for the greater good, which, in my opinion, would be a more open-source world.
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Interview with Dave Cantrell
FAS ID: dcantrell
Matrix Rooms: Looking right now it appears Fedora Council, FRCL, Introductions, Announcements, Fedora Meeting, and Fedora Meeting 1. I tend to go to rooms that people ask me to join. I also use it a lot for DMs and people find me that way. For me primarily I rely on Matrix for our online meetings and DMs with people. Email continues to be the most reliable way to reach me and have a conversation.
Questions
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I have been a member of FESCo for a while now and enjoy doing it. Fedora is really good at bringing in new technologies and ensuring that we minimize disruption for users. I enjoy the technical discussions and working together to ensure that changes account for everything before we bring them in. Making and having a plan is often difficult and requires a lot of coordination.
I am also interested in mentoring people interested in running for FESCo and introducing some changes to how we staff FESCo. There are discussions going on right now for that, but an important thing for me is ensuring we have a succession plan for FESCo that keeps Fedora going without burning people out. If you are interested in being on FESCo, please reach out to me!
Lastly, I feel very strongly about open source software and the licenses we have around it. I believe that it has fundamentally changed our industry and made it a better place. We continue to see changes come in to Fedora that bring challenges to those ideas and I want to ensure that Fedora’s position around open source, creator rights, and licensing are not lost or eroded.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
My job at Red Hat is working on the Software Management team. The two big projects on that team are dnf and rpm. But we also have a lot of dnf and rpm adjacent software. I am upstream for or contribute to numerous other projects. I also maintain a variety of packages in Fedora and EPEL as well as RHEL (and by extension CentOS Stream).
I am a sponsor for new contributors and I help mentor new developers in both the community and at Red Hat (that is, developers at Red Hat wanting to participate more in Fedora).
I am a member of the Fedora Council where I focus on engineering issues when we discuss large topics and strategy.
How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?
Communication has always been a challenge in our industry and community. We have language differences, cultural differences, and communication medium differences. One thing I notice a lot is that some discussions lead to people taking things personally. Often the root cause of that is people feeling like they are not being heard. A solution I have found is to suggest changing the communication medium. I am perfectly fine communicating over email, or chat, or other online methods. But talking in person can go a long way. We know the value of having in-person events and a lot of people find that their interactions with people in the community improve simply because they finally met someone in person at an event. While that is not always possible, we do have video conference capabilities these days. I do use that in Fedora and it helps quite a bit.
For everyone, if you find yourself in a frustrating situation, I recommend first stepping away and collecting your thoughts. Then remind yourself why everyone is involved in the first place. We all want to achieve the same things, so let’s try to work towards that and find common ground. And if necessary, suggest an alternate communication mechanism.
What else should community members know about you or your positions?
Most people are surprised to learn that I support protons more than electrons. I like being positive in everything I pursue. It’s ok for us to disagree. It’s ok to have a position, learn something new, and then change that position. The important thing to me is that Fedora ultimately remains a fun project.
My favorite color is orange. I use an Android mobile phone. I do not use current Apple hardware, but I am a big fan of the Apple II series and 68k Macintosh series. If you corner me, I will likely talk your ear off about the Apple IIgs or any Macintosh Quadra (particularly the various crazy and horrible operating systems Apple made for the platform).
This is a part of the Fedora Linux 43 FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts today, Wednesday 17th December and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, 7th January 2026.
Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?
I think Fedora as a project is in a good place. Our core responsibility is to put out a new release every six months, and we are doing that on schedule and with high quality. But there are always new challenges and issues that need to be solved. As a member of FESCo, I take the Change process seriously, trying to work with submitters to improve their proposals before they are approved, and keeping track of what remains to be done. I do my best to move the things I’m personally working on in the right direction, and I try to help others move the things they are working on.
Most of the proposals that FESCo gets to vote on are obvious. But every once in a while there are proposals which are a mistake. The tough part of the job is to distinguish between something that is risky but will be good for the project if done correctly, and ideas that are a mistake and should be rejected. FESCo is in the position to push back, and needs to do that with enough strength and visiblity to be effective.
The part of being in FESCo that I (and everybody else) likes the least is the slow-as-molasses tickets that get stuck on infrastructure changes or other external constraints. FESCo should do a better job of regularly returning to those, pushing for updates, and figuring out how to finally solve the problem. I like the idea of introducing the limits on consecutive terms of FESCo members to bring in new people and hopefully use this energy to tackle some long-standing issues.
How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?
I maintain systemd and a bunch of other packages in the python scientific stack, a bunch of tools related to installing Linux (mkosi, pacman, archlinux-keyring), and tooling for reproducibile builds (add-determinism).
The core motivation behind data analysis pipelines, and the focus of this article, is the need to establish a clear path from unprocessed data to actionable insights for contributor engagement and impact. The key question is “what are we trying to measure to ensure the continuity of community work?”
As a side note, my preparation for the ADSP (Advanced Data Analysis Semi-Professional) certification in Korea utilized RStudio Desktop, running on a Fedora Linux environment. I got hands-on with R’s core statistical toolkit, leveraging base functions. Among these were summary()1 and lm()2 as the basis for fundamental hypothesis testing and regression analysis3. I became more intrigued by R’s power after testing its data manipulation packages (especially the key package dplyr).
With this background in mind, the article focuses on the design of an analysis pipeline that fulfills three objectives:
it ensures scalable data transformation and analysis capabilities
Establishing such a robust foundation is essential for producing reliable and validated metrics for the contributor community, which itself is subject to ongoing definition and validation.
Acknowledgement: I extend my sincere gratitude to Justin Wheeler for connecting me with the Fedora Data Working Group (FDWG), and to Michael Winters and K Naraian for their guidance, discussion, and support throughout the design and validation of this data analysis pipeline.
Scope and Tool Selection: Please note that this analysis pipeline represents a combination of tools and methods chosen from my perspective as a data analyst, particularly one with a background in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) domain and consumer electronics industry. Therefore, other analysts or data engineers may utilize different combinations of technologies based on their own expertise or project requirements.
The role of the analyst is undergoing a fundamental transformation in 2025. We are moving beyond the traditional responsibility of performing statistical analysis and presenting visualization on pre-cleaned data. Today, the modern analyst must evolve into a “Data Ops(Operations)”. This requires a holistic understanding of the data lifecycle and bridging the gap between business context and data engineering. This expansion mandates a familiarity with ELT/ETL processes to examine the quality and structure of the data source.
Moreover, data analysts must be adept at processing diverse data types such as semi-structured data (for example, schema-less JSON strings or variant) and understanding various data access methods such as leveraging the efficiency of in-situ processing over the constraints of in-memory loading of datasets.
RStudio: The Unified IDE for Hybrid R and Python workflows
My ADSP examination requirements motivated my initial deep dive into RStudio. However, it is worth highlighting its utility as a tool for any data professional. The most significant benefit of using RStudio is its seamless ability to leverage the best tools from both the R and Python language ecosystems. This eliminates the need for the analyst to switch environments which leads to dramatically higher operational efficiency. This unified approach streamlines the analysis lifecycle from code execution to final reporting.
Python for data engineering
Use Python’s libraries like Pandas for efficient ETL/ELT operations, data manipulation on large datasets, and integrating with production environments or machine learning workflows (TensorFlow/PyTorch).
R for analysis and visualization
Utilize R’s statistical packages and its superior data visualization capabilities (ggplot2, R Shiny) for data analysis modeling, beautiful reporting, and creating customized, publication-ready graphics.
RStudio Desktop: Installation Instructions7 for Fedora Linux
Install R base packages using the terminal and verify:
$ sudo dnf install R
$ R --version
Now, install RStudio from the Fedora COPR repository. Note that these COPR packages conflict with the binary package provided by Posit. Remove the existing Posit RStudio binary package if you installed it.
Launch the RStudio. When the < prompt appears on the RStudio Console enter the following commands. Note that this prompt should appear in the bottom-left pane of the default layout.
Install the reticulate package and execute the function reticulate::py_install() to manage Python dependencies:
ragg is an indirect but critical dependency of core Tidyverse packages (such as ggplot2):
install.packages("ragg")
Install base packages for data manipulation:
install.packages("tidyverse")
DBI, tools for database interface, is an essential R package that provides a standardized, vendor-agnostic interface for connecting to and interacting with various database systems (both local and remote)
install.packages("DBI")
Install tools for Parquet files and S3 data lake access:
install.packages("arrow")
Install R Markdown for combining R code, and install Quarto for combining R/Python/SQL withits execution results, and explanatory text into reproducible data pipelines directly within the environment. The Quarto (.qmd) file runs code chunks in R, Python, and SQL in a single document.
install.packages(c("rmarkdown","quarto"))
Load packages for ELT and EDA:
library(tidyverse)
library(arrow)
RStudio environment showing the contents of a Parquet file displayed in a data frame
Data architecture pipeline
The specific dataset chosen, Datanommer (Fedora Messaging Streams), aligns with the strategic objectives of the Fedora Data Working Group, where I contribute. The data is stored in the Bronze Data Layer where raw data from source systems is ingested and stored, as-is, for scalable data lake storage. The Bronze Layer allows for schema evolution without breaking downstream processes.
To provide the Working Group with transparent access and initial insight into this data, I have prepared a shared Initial Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) Notebook. This notebook serves as the initial public view of the data quality and patterns, and it informed the subsequent architectural decisions for the scalable pipeline I am about to outline.
Given the complexity of the architecture, I will proceed with an outline of the core components, organized by their role in the ELT pipeline:
Data Architecture Diagram: Assisted by Figma ‘Infinite Canvas’
This restructured pipeline, leveraging the new Lakehouse architecture, unlocks several core benefits crucial for scaling contributor analysis and enabling future insights:
Elimination of Memory Constraints via In-Situ Processing
DuckDB acts as a high-performance analytical engine that enables In-Situ Processing. It queries data directly from storage (specifically the Parquet files) without requiring the entire dataset to be loaded into RAM. This not only solves the memory problem but also delivers rapid query execution and significantly lowers operational costs associated with large computational clusters hosted on the OpenShift/Fedora AWS infrastructure.
Quarto runs R code chunks to connect to DuckDB
Future-Proofing
The shift to a Lakehouse model ensures the pipeline is ready for growth and evolving data complexity. Future integration of Apache Iceberg and Apache Polaris will provide schema evolution capabilities. This ensures the pipeline is fully future-proofed against changes in underlying data structures.
Streamlined ELT Workflow and Multi-Lingual Access
I have redefined the processing workflow from a bottlenecked ETL model to a resilient Extract-Load-Transform (ELT) pattern. Parquet files with the variant type store semi-structured data (like JSON/nested structures), loaded raw into S3, simplifies the ingestion stage. When using R, it is recommended to read Parquet files using the Apache Arrow library.
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) using data frames in the Tidyverse
The parsed data is then accessible by multiple analytical platforms (R Shiny, Python, BI tools) without duplication or manual preparation. This multi-lingual access maximizes the utility of the clean data layer, supporting a growing number of analytical users and more complex queries necessary for defining long-term contributor metrics.
Initial EDA Notebook
The preliminary Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) was conducted within the Jupyter Notebook format. This allowed broad compatibility with the existing execution and review environment of the Fedora Data Working Group.
The Initial EDA Notebook is documented to ensure complete reproducibility. This included all necessary steps for the Python library installation and environment setup. Any standard Python script containing ELT logic can be seamlessly run within RStudio’s Python mode or “knitting8” an R Markdown document or rendering a Quarto file.
Conclusion
The establishment of this analysis pipeline represents a crucial step in transforming unprocessed Fedora data into actionable insights. By addressing the core challenges of scaling and in-memory processing through DuckDB, and enabling transparent analysis via the hybrid RStudio/Jupyter workflow, I have demonstrated viable methods for performing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) processes on vast community datasets. In conclusion, the purpose of this work is to foster deeper engagement across a broader community by analyzing data with a view that relates to the Fedora Project community.
I hope this pipeline will serve as the technical foundation that activates and focuses the community discussion around the specific variables and metrics needed to define and ensure the continuity of community contributions.
AI Assistance
The ideation, structural planning, and terminology refinement of the pipelines were assisted by Gemini and Figma.
summary(): When used on a data object (for example, DataFrame), it provides basic statistics (min, max, mean, median). When used on a fitted linear model object (lm), it delivers key diagnostic information like coefficient estimates and p-values. ︎
lm(): Stands for Linear Model. This is the core function for fitting linear regression models in R, allowing the user to examine and model the linear relationship between variables. ︎
Regression analysis examines which factors affect the other and which ones are irrelevant for statistical and business context. ︎
DuckDB is a column-oriented database architecture. – Direct Querying: It directly queries data from file formats such as Parquet, CSV, and JSON. – Local compute engine: It is widely used as a high-performance local compute engine for analytical workloads. It runs in-process, meaning it operates within your application (like a Python script or R session) without needing a separate server or cluster management. – Cloud Integration: It supports querying data stored in cloud storage services like AWS S3, GCS (Google Cloud Storage), and Azure Blob Storage. ︎
ELT (Extract, Load, Transform): In a modern data environment like a Lakehouse, ELT is preferred: data is first extracted from the source and loaded raw into the cloud data lake (S3), and then transformedin place by the processing engine like DuckDB. ︎
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load): transformations occur before loading the data into the final destination. ︎
Key Advantages of RStudio over Jupyter Notebook for Production Workflows;
Even with its slightly more complex initial setup compared to Jupyter Notebooks, the advantages become significant when moving from exploration (Jupyter’s strength) to reproducible, production-ready workflows (RStudio’s strength).
– Integrated Console, Source, Environment, and Files: RStudio offers a cohesive, four-pane layout that allows for seamless navigation between writing code, running commands, inspecting variables, and managing files/plots. Jupyter requires constant shifting between code cells and external tabs. – Superior Debugging Tools: RStudio includes a powerful, visual debugger that allows you to set breakpoints, step through code line-by-line, and inspect variable states directly in the environment pane. Jupyter’s debugging is typically cell-based and less intuitive. – Native Project Management: RStudio Projects (.Rproj files) automatically manage the working directory and history. This makes it easy to switch between different analytical tasks without conflicts. – Integrated Environment Management (renv): RStudio integrates seamlessly with tools like renv (R Environment) to create isolated, reproducible R environments. This addresses dependency hell by ensuring the exact package versions used in development are used in production, which is crucial for data pipeline version control. – Quarto/R Markdown Integration: RStudio provides dedicated tools and buttons for easily compiling and rendering complex analytical documents (like your Quarto file) into HTML, PDF, or presentation slides. – Shiny Integration: RStudio is the native environment for developing Shiny web applications—interactive dashboards and tools that turn analysis into deployable products. Jupyter requires separate frameworks (like Dash or Streamlit) for similar deployment. – Focus on Scripting: RStudio’s source editor is optimized for writing clean, structured R/Python scripts, which are preferred for building robust, scheduled pipeline components (like those managed by Airflow). – Code Chunk Execution (Quarto): Even when using Quarto, RStudio allows for superior navigation and execution of code chunks compared to the often sequential and state-dependent nature of Jupyter Notebook cells. ︎
knitr executes code in R Markdown (.Rmd) file by chunks or as a whole (typically by clicking the “Knit” button in RStudio or using rmarkdown::render() in R) ︎
This article series takes a closer look at interesting projects that recently landed in Copr.
Copr is a build-system for anyone in the Fedora community. It hosts thousands of projects with a wide variety of purposes, targeting diverse groups of users. Some of them should never be installed by anyone, some are already transitioning into the official Fedora repositories, and others fall somewhere in between. Copr allows you to install third-party software not found in the standard Fedora repositories, try nightly versions of your dependencies, use patched builds of your favourite tools to support some non-standard use-cases, and experiment freely.
Vicinae is a fast application launcher written in C++/QT. Inspired by tool Raycast, it provides instant app and file search and clipboard history. It also includes built-in utilities such as a calculator and web search, along with support for extensions written in TypeScript. It is designed to be highly responsive and native for Wayland environment. Therefore, if you like keeping your hands on the keyboard or want a customizable, extensible launcher for your desktop, Vicinae may be worth trying.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides vicinae for Fedora 42, 43, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:
UZDoom is a modern DOOM source port that builds upon classic GZDoom engine, offering hardware-accelerated rendering, an updated scripting system, improved mod support, and high-quality audio playback. At the same time, it maintains compatibility with classic WAD files while making the experience smooth on current systems.
Whether you are playing the original episodes or diving into extensive mod packs, UZDoom offers a convenient way to enjoy them.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides uzdoom for Fedora 42, 43, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:
Plasma Panel Colorizer is a widget for KDE Plasma that allows you to customize the panel’s appearance. In addition, it offers options for background tinting, blur, custom opacity levels, shadows, floating panels, or themes that differ from the stock Plasma look. It also includes full blur support and is updated for Plasma 6, making it easy to adjust your panel exactly the way you want.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides plasma-panel-colorizer for Fedora 42, 43, and Fedora Rawhide. To install it, use these commands:
Sfizz-ui is the graphical interface for the sfizz sampler engine, which is an open-source player for SFZ instrument libraries. The UI provides an accessible way to load SFZ instruments, adjust parameters, and integrate the sampler into your workflow. It also includes plugin support such as LV2 and VST3, making it suitable for music creation in a Linux DAW environment.
For musicians, sound designers, or anyone using SFZ sample libraries, sfizz-ui offers a polished interface.
Installation instructions
The repo currently provides sfizz-ui for Fedora 41, 42, and 43. To install it, use these commands:
Element Matrix services will be upgrading our fedora.im
and fedoraproject.org servers to use the new
Matrix Authentication Server.
This will allow clients to use the new element X and similar clients.
During the outage matrix servers will be unavailable, but messages
will be received after the outage is …
Generative AI systems are changing the way people interact with computers. MCP (model context protocol) is a way that enables LLMs to run commands and use tools to enable live, conversational interaction with systems. Using the new linux-mcp-server, let’s walk through how you can talk with your Fedora system for understanding your system and getting help troubleshooting it!
Introduction
Large language models (LLMs) can be an invaluable tool when investigating an issue on a Linux system. However, this can involve a lot of copy/pasting of information from the Linux terminal into a web based interface to an LLM model.
The model context protocol (MCP) acts as a bridge, enabling LLMs to interact with external tools and data sources. The linux-mcp-server utilizes this protocol to give LLMs the ability to interact with a Fedora Linux system. Instead of you manually copying and pasting terminal output, the linux-mcp-server enables the LLM to directly query system information and log entries.
By enabling an LLM direct access to system information and logs, it is transformed into an active part of the investigation process when troubleshooting an issue. It empowers an LLM to directly query the system state, allowing it to help identify performance bottlenecks, and identify important log entries that might be missed by a manual review.
Prior to MCP, there wasn’t as strong a standard and ecosystem for LLM systems to call tools. LLMs were thus frequently limited to have only the information contained in their training. They were isolated from the outside world. For example, if you asked an LLM “what is the weather going to be next week”, the LLM would respond with a message indicating that it doesn’t know what the weather will be, as it doesn’t have access to that information. MCP helps solve this problem by enabling a standardized way for an LLM to access an outside data source, such as the weather forecast.
At a high level, users can use an AI agent application, such as Goose (open source), or Claude Desktop, and specify which MCP servers they would like to use. The AI agent application informs the LLM that there are tools available via these MCP servers that can be used to help answer the requests from the user. The LLM model can then decide when to invoke these tools.
MCP is an open standard. You have the flexibility to use MCP servers, such as linux-mcp-server, with either open source-licensed LLM models, or hosted proprietary LLM models.
What is the linux-mcp-server?
The linux-mcp-server is a project started by Red Hat’s RHEL Engineering team. It provides a number of tools that enable an LLM to query information from a Linux system, such as system info, service information and logs, process information, journald and other logs, network information, and storage and disk information. For a full list of the tools provided, refer to the project’s Github page.
These tools, provided by linux-mcp-server, are focused on providing the LLM access to read-only information. In the future, we’ll be exploring expanding past these read-only use cases.
The linux-mcp-server can be used to interact with the local Fedora Linux system that it is running on. It can also be used to interact with remote Fedora Linux systems over SSH. For example, if you have SSH key authentication setup with the remote systems, you could make a request to your AI agent application such as “Determine the current memory usage on the fedora1.example.com, fedora2.example.com, and fedora3.example.com servers”.
Prerequisites
The main components needed are an AI agent application, access to LLM model inference, and the linux-mcp-server.
There are a number of options for the AI agent application, both open source and proprietary. An example of an open source AI agent is Goose, which provides an RPM that can be installed on Fedora.
There are several LLM model inference options, ranging from locally hosted open source models, to proprietary hosted LLM models. If hosting a model locally, you generally need to have GPU/accelerator hardware available. Open source tools that can be used to locally host LLM models include RamaLama, llama.cpp, and Ollama. There are a number of open source LLM models capable of tool calling. These include models such as gpt-oss-20b and Granite 4 small.
Once you’ve installed your preferred AI agent application, the next step is to install the linux-mcp-server and configure your AI agent application to use it. The linux-mcp-server Github page includes installation instructions, and configuration details for Goose and Claude Desktop.
Use cases for linux-mcp-server
NOTE
The example scenarios below include LLM generated output. The output is presented here as it was generated by the AI systems cited so you can assess the quality of the output they are capable of, particularly in a non-cloud, self-hosted scenario.
The sample LLM output provided here is not intended to be run by readers without the same level of review we recommend anyone perform on AI generated content prior to use on their systems.
Dear Fedora, why are you so slow today?
Has this happened to you? Time to hop on a call and give a demo. You’re pumped. It’s your go-time aaaaand… your system starts lagging. Folks on the call say your video is choppy or they can’t understand you. OH NO.
You’ve got to assess what’s up, quickly. Run `top`, check `dmesg`, check your network connection (read the man page for `netstat` because you can’t remember the flag you want), check `journalctl`, cross-reference what you’re seeing, then start killing processes, restarting services, reloading kernel modules willy-nilly based on hastily-crafted theories, see if it improves…
This is a case where you could actually ask the system to tell you why it’s slow and give it the ability to do the analysis via linux-mcp-tools. The LLM you connect with won’t just run the commands through the MCP server; it will understand what the numbers it gets means in context and be able to explain in human terms.
So let’s start working with a relatively new laptop. It’s a Thinkpad T14S with the AMD Ryzen AI Pro 7 ( Ryzen AI 360 chip.) Recently one of the wifi networks it must connect to regularly was upgraded. It now has issues with the network connection stability. So let’s talk to Goose + gpt-oss:20b + linux-mcp-server about it. Here’s the initial prompt I used:
My Wifi doesn't work very well. It cuts out after a few minutes. Help me fix it. Can you find the error messages in the system logs and diagnose the problem?
It responded with the following:
I'll help you diagnose your WiFi connectivity issues by examining the system logs for error messages related to your network interfaces and wireless connectivity. Let me start by gathering information about your system and checking the relevant logs.
LLM output
I’ll help you diagnose your WiFi connectivity issues by examining the system logs for error messages related to your network interfaces and wireless connectivity. Let me start by gathering information about your system and checking the relevant logs.
It then made a series of tool calls, including Get System Information, Get Network Interfaces, Get Journal Logs, Get Hardware Information, Get Service Status service_name:NetworkManager, Get Service Status service_name:wpa_supplicant, Read Log File. The result was this analysis, which is the actual problem I was hoping it could find!
LLM output
Problem Summary – AT‑H12K PCI Wi‑Fi Issue
Problem Summary
Your ATH12K PCI (Qualcomm 802.11ax) wireless card repeatedly reports
ath12k_pci 0000:c2:00.0: failed to enqueue rx buf: -28
every few minutes, which triggers a drop of the wireless link. The driver is trying to enqueue an RX buffer for the hardware but fails with errno ‑28.
‑28 →
-ENOMEM
(out‑of‑memory for the driver buffer); the kernel cannot allocate a DMA‑coherent RX descriptor.
Likely Root Causes
Cause
Evidence / Typical Scenario
Fix / Work‑around
Driver bug or missing patch
The kernel’s ath12k driver has had a long‑running issue with RX ring management in older 5.15/5.4 series.
Update the kernel or apply the latest patch from the
linux
tree (5.18+ or the
ath12k
backports).
Out‑of‑memory in the driver
The error itself is “‑28” – a memory‑allocation failure inside the driver.
Reduce the number of RX descriptors, or enable fast‑RX disabled mode (
modprobe ath12k_pci ath12k_pci_disable_fast_rx=1
).
Firmware mismatch / corruption
Old firmware (
ath12k_hwgen
files) don’t match the driver version.
Reinstall firmware from your distro (
sudo apt‑install --reinstall linux‑firmware
) or copy the latest from kernel source.
System memory pressure
If many big processes run, DMA‑coherent memory pool can be exhausted.
Free RAM, close memory‑heavy apps, or add swap.
ACPI/PCIe power‑management quirk
Some laptops throttle the Wi‑Fi device after idle, resetting the buffer queue.
Add
pci_bus_reset = off
or set
ath12k_pci_disable_ps=1
in a modprobe conf.
Hardware issue (e.g., faulty PCIe slot or NIC)
Persistent failure after multiple driver/kernel upgrades.
Test on another machine/PCIe slot or replace the card.
Diagnostic Checklist
Kernel & Driver Version
uname -r
modinfo ath12k_pci | grep ^version:
Driver Parameters
cat /sys/module/ath12k_pci/parameters/*
– See if
ath12k_pci_disable_fast_rx
or similar is already set.
Firmware Location
ls /lib/firmware/ath12k/ath12k/ar9009/ | grep wlan0 | head
– If the files are missing or older than the driver, copy newer ones from
The “failed to enqueue rx buf: –28” is an internal driver allocation failure that typically follows one of two paths:
The driver or firmware is out of date → upgrade kernel/firmware.
The driver configuration is too aggressive for your system’s memory budget → tweak module parameters or free RAM.
If you're still stuck after following the quick‑fix path, it's worth capturing more detailed logs with the above diagnostic commands and sharing them. We can then cross‑reference the exact kernel version/driver commit to see if a known patch exists.
Feel free to let me know which step you’ve tried or if you encounter any new log messages, and we’ll dig deeper!
Not too bad an analysis and set of debugging steps! I’ll follow up in the comments and let you know if the solution works.
Where’d my disk space go, Fedora?
Trawling through `du` on the command line, converting the numbers in your head, sorting them – it can be tedious. We even have graphical tools like `baobab`, but it takes time to load in the results and explore the data. And sometimes you might have questions it can’t answer in terms of the risk of deleting a specific directory, or the age of a specific file. It’s easier to be sloppy and just let the disk fill up. But there comes a time where that is no longer an option.
You can ask the system using the linux-mcp-server to analyze your disk usage, give you a hitlist of the top space-eating places on the file system, and give you advice with a risk analysis of how to clean it up.
Here’s my prompt:
I need help analyzing disk usage on my system. Can you:
1. Show me the current disk usage across all filesystems using get_disk_usage
2. Use list_directories_by_size to show me the 10 largest directories (this will help identify where disk space is being consumed)
3. Check if there are any large log files consuming space using get_journal_logs or read_log_file
4. Review running processes with list_processes to see if any are consuming excessive resources or creating temporary files
After gathering this information, help me identify potential space-saving opportunities and assess the safety of cleaning up specific directories. Please don't only examine top-level directories. I want you to go deep if needed to find out where the largest files are!
I ran this prompt on my Fedora 42 system using linux-mcp-server with Goose connected to locally-served gpt-oss:20b, and here’s the output I got:
LLM output
Disk‑space overview (as of Nov 24 2025 15:21)
Filesystem
Size
Used
Avail
Use %
Mounted on
/dev/mapper/luks‑61cedb0e…
952.3 GB
548.9 GB
399.6 GB
57.9 %
/
/dev/mapper/luks‑61cedb0e…
952.3 GB
548.9 GB
399.6 GB
57.9 %
/home
/dev/nvme0n1p2
973.4 MB
462.8 MB
443.4 MB
51.1 %
/boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1
598.8 MB
19.3 MB
579.6 MB
3.2 %
/boot/efi
Overall usage is comfortably below 60 % of a 952 GB volume, so immediate capacity pressure isn’t a concern. The biggest contributors to disk space today are in the ~/. hierarchy.
1. Biggest directories on the system
Path (relative to the mount point)
Size (≈)
Notes
~/ – User home (2 mounts: /home + /)
1 TB total
57 % used; the bulk of the space is in ~/
| ~/duffy/.local/share | 238 GB | Containers sub-dir, followed by Trash (7GB) – typical podman/docker container images | | ~/duffy/.local/share/containers | 238 GB | Container layers, images, root filesystems – the prime candidate for cleanup | | ~/duffy/.local | 266 GB | share (237 GB) dominates it | | ~/duffy/.local/share/containers (inside share) | 238 GB | Same as above – just a different view | | ~/duffy/.local/lib | 13 GB | Likely a virtual‑environment library set | | ~/duffy/.local/bin | 4 GB | Helper binaries | | ~/duffy/.local/share/Trash | 7 GB | User‑deleted items still resident on disk | | ~/duffy/.local/share/containers (nested) | 238 GB | Same as above; redundant listings from recursive depth‑1 scans | | ~/duffy/.local/share (top‑level) | 238 GB | containers is the absolute largest item |
Take‑away – 75 % of the 238 GB live inside three nested directories:
~/duffy/.local/share/containers (238 GB) → Rooted in Podman/Container‑Store
~/duffy/.local/share (238 GB) → Same data exposed at a higher level
~/duffy/.local/share/Trash (7 GB)
2. Possible space savers
Category
Recommendation
Rationale
Containers
podman system prune -a (or docker system prune -a if Docker is in use)
Removes unreferenced images, containers, and caches. This can reclaim 200–250 GB if most containers are outdated or no longer referenced.
Trash
gio trash –empty
The 7 GB in Trash is still taking physical space; simply emptying it will free that amount.
Large libs/binaries
Check ~/duffy/.local/lib – 13 GB, and ~/duffy/.local/bin – 4 GB
If these are not actively used by a project, consider uninstalling or moving them to a secondary, less‑frequented store.
Ramalama & UV
9 GB (ramalama), 8 GB (uv)
Possibly temporary files or caches from development tools. Inspecting the contents of these directories (du -h) can reveal if they are still needed.
Other caches
pnpm store prune, virtualenv or pip cache purge
Development tool caches often accumulate; they’re usually safe to delete once you’re done with the current development sessions.
Logs
The system journal shows normal activity, and syslog access is blocked by policy.
Systemd journal stores are rotated automatically; no urgent action required.
Boot partitions
Not relevant – they’re low‑usage (boot/efi only 3 % used).
If writes are high relative to free space, consider enabling a tmpfs overlay for temporary files or moving large data to a separate, faster SSD. But in this case, writes are not approaching the 399 GB free.
4. Suggested cleanup workflow
# 1. Empty Trash
gio trash --empty
# 2. Prune unused containers/images
podman system prune -a # or docker system prune -a
# 3. Remove leftover caches
pnpm store prune # if pnpm is installed
pip cache purge # for Python
virtualenv --clean # optional
# 4. Inspect large “RAM” directories manually if you need deeper cleanup
du -h --max-depth=1 ~/duffy/.local/share/containers
Tip: After each step run df -h /home or du -sh ~/duffy/.local/* to see the impact.
5. Safety checklist
Action
Why it’s safe (or risk)
Emptying Trash
Deletes only user‑deleted files; confirm you don’t need the content.
podman system prune -a
Deletes container images, containers, and volumes that are not referenced by any running or stopped container. Verify with podman ps -a before pruning.
Removing lib/bin from .local
Only safe if you’re sure those libraries/bin files aren’t part of a running application.
Caution with tmpfs or moving large directories
If you move a directory on‑the‑fly, ensure no running application depends on that path.
Bottom line
Current free space: ≈ 400 GB on both / and /home.
Largest consumptions: User‑space under ~/duffy/.local/share/containers (≈ 238 GB).
Actionable clean‑ups: Empty Trash, prune unused container images, and review large libraries/binaries. This should reclaim over 200 GB and bring the usage from 57.9 % down to roughly 40‑45 % – plenty of headroom for the future.
Feel free to ask what next steps you’d like to dig into (e.g., detailed contents of the containers dir, specific application logs, or targeted pruning commands).
Upgrade planning
So you may have noticed a little detail above – the system is a Fedora 42 system… and Fedora 43’s been out a month now! So, time to upgrade.
This example shows where we have some tools missing from the set provided in the linux-mcp-server. We’re including it for two reasons:
So you can see how this works manually You can see that even when specific tools you might not need are available in the MCP server, you can have the response give you instructions on commands to run on your own, and copy/paste the command output back into your chat to get analysis alongside the data the system is able to pull via the MCP tool calls;
Here’s the prompt I started with, with the same Goose + gpt-oss:20b + linux-mcp-server combination:
You are a Linux system administrator assistant analyzing a Fedora system for upgrade readiness.
TASK: Examine this Fedora 42 system and provide a comprehensive upgrade readiness report for Fedora 43.
ANALYSIS CHECKLIST:
1. Check current Fedora version: cat /etc/fedora-release
2. Review system updates status: dnf check-update
3. Identify third-party repositories: dnf repolist
4. List installed packages from non-Fedora repos: dnf list installed | grep -v @fedora
5. Check for broken dependencies: dnf check
6. Review disk space on root partition: df -h /
7. Check for unsupported or deprecated packages
8. Identify custom kernel modules: lsmod | grep -v "^Module"
9. Review SELinux status: sestatus
10. Check for pending system updates: dnf upgrade --refresh --assumeno
REPORT FORMAT:
# Fedora 43 Upgrade Readiness Report
## Current System Status
- Fedora version: [version]
- Kernel: [kernel version]
- Updates status: [current/outdated]
## Potential Issues
[List blocking issues with HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW severity]
## Third-Party Software
[List non-Fedora packages that may need attention]
## Recommendations
[Specific pre-upgrade steps needed]
## Overall Readiness: [READY/NEEDS ATTENTION/NOT READY]
Run the necessary commands and provide this analysis. Be specific about any issues found and give actionable recommendations.
Now, right away the model came back to me to complain it doesn’t have access to `dnf`, `cat`, etc. And that’s expected here. What it did was give me a list of homework to run for it to complete the analysis… for example, `dnf check-update` and `cat /etc/fedora-release`. I had a little back and forth in Goose with the model where it would ask me to run a command and I’d copy the output into the context. This resulted, finally, in the following report:
LLM output
Fedora 43 Upgrade Readiness Report
Analyzed System – Fedora 42 (Kernel 6.17.7‑200.fc42.x86_64) Date – 2025‑11‑24
sudo sed -i ‘s/SELINUX=permissive/SELINUX=enforcing/’ /etc/selinux/config
Make enforcement permanent.
5. Post‑Upgrade Actions
Reboot into the new kernel (dnf system-upgrade reboot).
Re‑compile any custom kernel modules against the new kernel (yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r) then rebuild modules).
Re‑enable any disabled repos once the upgrade completes.
Verify critical services (systemctl status <service>) and check logs.
Run sudo dnf distro-sync to ensure all packages are the latest from Fedora 43.
6. Overall Readiness
Criteria
Status
Comment
Disk space
Ready
58 % free
Package health
Ready
No held or broken packages
Third‑party repos
Conditional
Verify 43‑compatibility
Custom modules
Pending
Need to identify modules and re‑compile
Final verdict
READY (after addressing above points)
Next step – Run the three verification commands below and share the output with me:
sudo dnf check
sudo dnf repolist
dnf list installed | grep -v @fedora
With those outputs I can pinpoint any remaining blockers and give you a final, ready‑to‑proceed plan.
Happy upgrading!
Give it a try, let us know what you think!
You can see from these few examples that tool calling with LLMs is a valuable tool for troubleshooting Linux systems. We could use your help building this and making it awesome! How can you help?
We’re primarily working with Goose as our client, but if you have another preferred client and want to help us support it better, we’d love to work with you!
Get involved in the linux-mcp-project generally, we’d love to see your PRs!
Let us know what you’d like to see in the future. What workflows would you like to see supported? How do you see this making your Fedora or overall Linux experience better? What larger workflows do you see this plugging into?
This outage impacts the Fedora Copr Frontend. Seems like these bots were attracted by our outage announce: Baudispider, YandexBot, ClaudoBot, AmazonBot, Presto, https://openai.com/bot TikTokSpider, which are currently DDoSing us and causing performance degradation.
Apply now for the Flock to Fedora 2026 Call for Proposals (CfP) at cfp.fedoraproject.org. This year, the submission deadline for the Flock CfP is Monday, February 2nd, 2026.
Flock 2026 registration is open
Last month we announced that we’ll be convening again in Prague for Flock 2026 in June. Everyone interested in attending can head over to the Flock 2026 website and register today! For those of you who want to contribute to Flock by presenting your thoughts and ideas in front of your fellow contributors, we’ve got some inspiration for you in the form of updated proposal themes.
Flock 2026 proposal themes
This year’s proposal themes are inspired by Fedora’s four foundations:
Freedom: The Open Frontier — This theme explores how Fedora pushes the boundaries of technological freedom. We invite proposals on FOSS approaches to Artificial Intelligence, the advancement of open hardware like RISC-V, the development of open standards, and the protection of data privacy. Sessions should focus on how our work in the Fedora Project creates a more free and collaborative technological world for everyone.
Friends: Our Fedora Story — This theme celebrates the people and practices that make our community unique. We seek proposals that share stories of mentorship, successful team collaboration, and effective onboarding within Fedora. Collaboration is key to our success. Sessions about our partnerships with other FOSS communities should center on the mutual benefits and the positive impact these relationships have on the Fedora Project.
Features: Engineering Fedora’s Core — As a contributor conference, this theme dives deep into the craft of building our distribution and other Fedora outputs. We welcome sessions on improvements to our infrastructure, release engineering processes, quality assurance, packaging, and community tooling. This is the place for technical talks that showcase our engineering excellence and the collaborative work that makes Fedora’s deliverables possible, from code to final artifact.
First: Blueprint for the Future: Fedora Linux 45 & 46 — This theme focuses on the near-term innovations that will define the next generation of Linux. With the next few Fedora Linux releases serving as the foundation for RHEL 11 and EPEL 11, this is a critical time. We are looking for forward-looking technical talks on the changes, features, and architectural decisions in F45 and F46 that will shape the future of the operating system, from the community desktop to the core of the enterprise platforms.
These themes are here to help get you thinking about topics you’d like to present. If you have something you want to talk about that doesn’t quite fit neatly into these themes, but you feel it belongs at Flock, go ahead and submit anyways! The reviewers are open to alternative topics. They are on the look out for topics that Fedora contributors are interested in discussing.
Flock financial travel assistance available
Financial travel assistance applications are now open as well. When you go to register to attend on the Flock 2026 website, you should also see links on how to apply for travel assistance if you need it. Financial assistance will be open until March 8th (several weeks after CfP closes on Febuary 8th). This is to give those with accepted talks an opportunity to figure out if they’ll need travel assistance.
We will be powering off hardware in our rdu2 datacenter,
it will be deracked and moved to our rdu3 datacenter,
reracked, and reconfigured for the new network.
retrace/abrt/faf will be down and not accepting user reports
smtp-auth-cc-rdu01 will be down and not accepting emails
download-cc-rdu01 will be down …
There is heavy scraper activity cauing high load and slow load times
on https://src.fedoraproject.org.
We are investigating and trying to mitigate it.
The issue was scrapers hitting /history/ and /blame/ endpoints recursively.
We have at least for now blocked those endpoints. Please git clone locally
if you …
TL;DNR: The Fedora Linux 43 Election schedule has been extended. Voting will now take place from 15 December 2025 through 7 January 2026.
Due to unforeseen delays in the interview coordination process, we are adjusting the election timeline. To ensure all candidates have ample opportunity to present their platforms and the community has sufficient time to vote, the election period will now extend through the year-end holidays.
Please mark your calendars with the following new critical dates:
New Election Schedule
Interview Submission Deadline (Extended): Now through Friday, 12 December 2025 at 23:59 UTC(Candidates: Please ensure your responses are submitted by this time.)
Voting Setup & Interview Publishing:Monday, 15 December 2025(Voter guides and interviews will be published to the community on this date.)
Voting Period Opens:Monday, 15 December 2025
Voting Period Closes:Wednesday, 7 January 2026 at 23:59 UTC
Context on the Schedule Change
Transparency is an important value of the Fedora Project, and I want to provide context on why this shift was necessary. I recently returned from two weeks of bereavement leave on Wednesday, 3 December. During my absence, the coordination work required to collect and process nominee interviews for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) did not occur as originally planned.
Consequently, we missed the window to launch the elections today, Friday, 5 December. Rather than rushing the process, we are opting to extend the timeline. This ensures that our candidates are properly featured and that the election remains fair and accessible to all voters, despite the holiday season overlap.
The official Fedora schedule calendar is being updated to reflect these changes shortly. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infratructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: December 1 – December 5 2025
Fedora Infrastructure
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure. Ticket tracker
Pagure.io migration happened earlier in the week, expected disruption during that (https://status.fedoraproject.org for details)
RDU2-CC -> RDU3 DC move next week
OpenID finally has a date to be retired – we have a separate OpenID instance of Ipsilon that serves a warning (ticket)
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure. It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infratrusture and CentOS Stream. CentOS ticket tracker CentOS Stream ticket tracker
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases. It’s responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds. Ticket tracker
F43 rebuild is still ongoing. The diff with primary arch is now about ~1K packages. Still ironing out some rough edges. (A bug with “debugedit” is affecting a number of packages.)
Handled empty dates in Pagure milestone migration in the Forgejo upstream [Issue] [PR]
Initial preparation work being carried out to deploy the Forgejo “dist-git” instance – konflux pipelines for distgit are ready, with images with stable fedora available on quay.
Forgejo runners can be scoped to global/organization/individual on staging.
[Docs] Starting to migrate select repositories, first one to be the Release Notes
QE
A first QE repo got migrated from Pagure to Fedora Forge production server, as a guinea pig. A set of helper scripts were created to perform necessary post-migration tasks (see more in the AI section).
Planned Outage - pagure.io migration - 2025-12-03 21:00-23:00 UTC
We will be migrating pagure.io to a new network in our rdu3 datacenter. All
services on pagure.io will be taken down, all data synced, and then services
will be restored on the new server/datacenter. IP addresses for …
It’s finally here. We have an end date for OpenID in Fedora. The date is 1st May 2026. You can see it on the banner on https://id.fedoraproject.org/openid and it will be shown to you every time when trying to authenticate with OpenID. The date 1st May 2026 should give anybody still using OpenID authentication enough time to migrate to OpenID Connect.
We started our move to OpenID Connect and away from old OpenID authentication 4 years ago. This was a long road with plenty of obstacles on the way. We first ported all apps we own in Fedora Infrastructure to OpenID Connect. That took time, but we had at least control over these applications.
After porting all our applications we started to look at the application using OpenID authentication outside of Fedora ecosystem. This proved to be really difficult as those clients don’t need to register with Fedora Authentication System.
After some failures to contact the projects that we at least identified to use OpenID in Fedora, we decided that the best course of option is to separate the OpenID authentication system (the service that is providing it is called Ipsilon, which we want to decommission as well). I spent the last two months working on separating the OpenID authentication from OpenID Connect and SAML2. You can see the result on https://id.fedoraproject.org/openid.
This will now allow us to replace Ipsilon for both OpenID Connect and SAML2 and as most of the separation logic is in proxies, we should have no issue to reuse that for the new solution. This should resolve plenty of issues we are experiencing with current authentication system and let us remove one service from the portfolio of services we own in Fedora Infrastructure. We are looking forward to brighter future!
This is a report created by CLE Team, which is a team containing community members working in various Fedora groups for example Infratructure, Release Engineering, Quality etc. This team is also moving forward some initiatives inside Fedora project.
Week: 17 November – 21 November 2025
Fedora Infrastructure
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora Infrastructure. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora infrastructure. Ticket tracker
The intermittent 503 timeout issues plaguing the infra appear to finally be resolved, kudos to Kevin and the Networking team for tracking it down.
The Power10 hosts which caused the outage last week are now installed and ready for use.
Crashlooping OCP worker caused issues with log01 disk space
Monitoring migration to Zabbix is moving along, with discussions of when to make it “official”.
AI scrapers continue to cause significant load. A change has been made to bring some of the hits to src.fpo under the Varnish cache, which may help.
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding CentOS Infrastructure and CentOS Stream Infrastructure. It’s responsible for services running in CentOS Infratrusture and CentOS Stream. CentOS ticket tracker CentOS Stream ticket tracker
https://cbs.centos.org is now fully live from RDU3 (DC-move) : kojihub/builders in rdu3 and/or remote AWS VPC isolated network, and also signing/releng process
Release Engineering
This team is taking care of day to day business regarding Fedora releases. It’s responsible for releases, retirement process of packages and package builds. Ticket tracker
F43 RISC-V rebuild status: the delta for F43 RISC-V is still about ~2.5K packages compared to F43 primary. Current plan: once we hit ~2K package delta, we’ll start focusing on the quality of the rebuild and fix whatever important stuff that needs fixing. (Here is the last interim update to the community.)
Community highlight: David Abdurachmanov (Rivos Inc) has been doing excellent work on Fedora 43 rebuild, doing a lot of heavy-lifting. He also provides quite some personal hardware for Koji rebuilders.
As FPL I believe Fedora needs to be part of a healthy flatpak ecosystem. I’d like to share my journey in working towards that over the last few months with you all, and include some of the insights that I’ve gained. I hope by sharing this with you it will encourage those who share my belief to join with me in the journey to take us to a better future for Fedora and the entire ecosystem.
The immediate goal
First, my immediate goal is to get the Fedora ChangeProposal that was submitted to make Flathub the default remote for some of the Atomic desktops accepted on reproposal. I believe implementing the idea expressed in that ChangeProposal is the best available option for the Atomic desktops that help us down the path I want to see us walking together.
There seems to be wide appeal from both the maintainers of specific Fedora outputs, and the subset of Fedora users of those desktop outputs, that using Flathub is the best tradeoff available for the defaults. I am explicitly not in favor of shuttering the Fedora flatpaks, but I do see value in changing the default remote, where it is reasonable and desirable to do so. I continue to be sensitive to the idea that Fedora Flatpaks can exist because it is delivering value to a subset of users, even when it’s not the default remote but still targeting an overlapping set of applications serving different use cases. I don’t view this as a zero-sum situation; the important discussion right now is about what the defaults should be for specific Fedora outputs.
What I did this summer
There is a history of change proposals being tabled and then coming back in the next cycle after some of the technical concerns were addressed. There is nothing precedent-setting in how the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee handled this situation. Part of getting to the immediate goal, from my point of view, was doing the due diligence on some of the concerns raised in the FESCo discussion leading to the decision to table the proposal in the last release. So in an effort to get things in shape for a successful outcome for the reproposal, I took it on myself to do some of the work to understand the technical concerns around the corresponding source requirements of the GPL and LGPL licenses.
I felt like we were making some good progress in the Fedora discussion forums back in July. In particular, Timothee was a great help and wrote up an entirely new document on how to get corresponding sources for applications built in flathub’s infrastructure. That discussion and the resulting documentation output showed great progress in bringing the signal to noise ratio up and addressing the concerns raised in the FESCo discussion. In fact, this was a critical part of the talk I gave at GUADEC. People came up to me after that talk and said they weren’t aware of that extension that Timothee documented. We were making some really great progress out in the open and setting a stage for a successful reproposal in the next Fedora cycle.
Okay, that’s all context intended to help you, dear reader, understand where my head is at. Hopefully we can all agree my efforts were aligned with the goal leading up to late July. The next part gets a bit harder to talk about, and involves a discussion of communication fumbles, which is not a fun topic.
The last 3 months
Unfortunately, at GUADEC I found a different problem, one I wasn’t expecting to find. Luckily, I was able to communicate face to face with people involved and they confirmed my findings, committed on the spot to get it fixed, and we had a discussion on how to proceed. This started an embargo period where I couldn’t participate in the public narrative work in the community I lead. That embargo ended up being nearly 3 months. I don’t think any of us who spoke in person that day at GUADEC had any expectation that the embargo would last so long.
Through all of this, I was in communication with Rob McQueen, VP of the Gnome Foundation, and one of the Flathub founders, checking in periodically on when it was reasonable for me to start talking publicly again. It seems that the people involved in resolving the issues took it so seriously that they not only addressed the deficiencies I found -missing files- but committed to creating significant tooling changes to help prevent it from happening again. Some characterized that work as “busting their asses.” That’s great, especially considering much of that work is probably volunteer effort. Taking the initiative to solve not just the immediate problem, but building tooling to help prevent it is a fantastic commitment, and in line with what I would expect from the volunteers in the Fedora community itself. We’re more aligned than we realize I think.
What I’ve learned from this is there’s a balance with regard to embargos that must be struck. Thinking about it, we might have been better served if we had agreed to scope the embargo at the outset and then adjusted later with a discussion on extending the time further, that also gave me visibility into why it was taking additional time. It’s one of the ideas I’d like to talk to people about to help ensure this is handled better in the future. There are opportunities to do the sensitive communications a bit better in the future, and I hope in the weeks ahead to talk with people about some ideas on that.
Now with the embargo lifted, I’ve resumed working towards a successful change reproposal. I’ve restarted my investigation of corresponding source availability for the runtimes. We lost 3 months to the embargo, but I think there is still work to be done. Already, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had one face to face discussion with a FESCo member, specifically about putting a reproposal together, and got useful feedback on the approach to that.
So that’s where we are at now. What’s next?
The future
I am still working on understanding how source availability works for the Flathub runtimes. I think there is a documentation gap here, like there was for the flatpak-builder sources extension. My ask to the Fedora community, particularly those motivated to find paths forward for Flathub as the default choice for bootc based Fedora desktops, is to join me in clarifying how source availability for the critical FLOSS runtimes works so we can help Flathub by contributing documentation that all Flathub users can find and make use of.
Like I said in my GUADEC talk, having a coherent (but not perfect) understanding of how Fedora users can get the flatpak corresponding sources and make local patched builds is important to me to figure out as we walk towards a future where Flathub is the default remote for Fedora. We have to get to a future where application developers can look at the entire linux ecosystem as one target. I think this is part of what takes the Linux desktop to the next level. But we need to do it in a way that ensures that end users have access to all the necessary source code to stay in control of their FLOSS software consumption. Ensuring users have the ability to patch and build software for themselves is vital, even if it’s never something the vast majority of users will need to do. Hopefully, we’re just a couple more documents away from telling that story adequately for Flathub flatpaks.
I’ve found that some of the most contentious discussions can be with people with whom you actually have a significant amount of agreement. Back in graduate school, when my officemate and I would talk about anything we both felt well-informed about and were in high agreement on: politics, comic books, science, whatever it was.. we’d get into some of the craziest, heated arguments about our small differences of opinion, which were minor in comparison to how much we agreed on. And it was never about needing to be right at the expense of the other person. It was never about him proving me wrong or me proving him wrong. It was because we really deeply wanted to be even more closely aligned. After all, we valued each other’s opinions. It’s weird to think about how much energy we spent doing that. And I get some of the same feeling that this is what’s going on now around flatpaks. Sometimes we just need to take a second and value the alignment we do have. I think there’s a lot to value right now in the Fedora and Flathub relationship, and I’m committed to find ways both communities can add value to each other as we walk into the future.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 10th – 14th November 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
We did it again, Fedora at Kirinyaga university in Kenya. This time, we didn’t just introduce what open source is – we showed students how to participate and actually contribute in real time.
Many students had heard of open source before, but were not sure how to get started or where they could fit. We did it hands-on and began with a simple explanation of what open source is: people around the world working together to create tools, share knowledge, and support each other. Fedora is one of these communities. It is open, friendly, and built by different people with different skills.
We talked about the many ways someone can contribute, even without deep technical experience. Documentation, writing guides, design work, translation, testing software, and helping new contributors are all important roles in Fedora. Students learned that open source is not only for “experts.” It is also for learners. It is a place to grow.
Hands-on Documentation Workshop
After the introduction, we moved into a hands-on workshop. We opened Fedora Docs and explored how documentation is structured. Students learned how to find issues, read contribution instructions, and make changes step-by-step. We walked together through:
Opening or choosing an issue to work on
Editing documentation files
Making a pull request (PR)
Writing a clear contribution message
By the end of the workshop, students had created actual contributions that went to the Fedora project. This moment was important. It showed them that contributing is not something you wait to do “someday.” You can do it today.
Through the guidance of Cornelius Emase, I was able to make my first pull request to the Fedora Project Docs – my first ever contribution to the open-source world. ” – Student at Kirinyaga University
Thank you note
Huge appreciation to:
Jona Azizaj — for steady guidance and mentorship.
Mat H. — for backing the vision of regional community building.
Fedora Mindshare Team — for supporting community growth here in Kenya.
Computer Society of Kirinyaga — for hosting and bringing real energy into the room.
And to everyone who played a part – even if your name isn’t listed here, I see you. You made this possible.
Growing the next generation
The students showed interest, curiosity, and energy. Many asked how they can continue contributing and how to connect with the wider Fedora community. I guided them to Fedora Docs, Matrix community chat rooms, and how they can be part of the Fedora local meetups here in Kenya.
We are introducing open source step-by-step in Kenya. There is a new generation of students who want to be part of global technology work. They want to learn, collaborate, and build. Our role is to open the door and walk together(I have a discourse post on this, you’re welcome to add your views).
What Comes Next
This event is part of a growing movement to strengthen Fedora’s presence in Kenya. More events will follow so that learning and contributing can continue.
We believe that open source becomes strong when more people are included. Fedora is a place where students in Kenya can learn, grow, share, and contribute to something global.
We already had a Discourse thread running for this event – from the first announcement, planning, and budget proposal, all the way to the final workshop. Everything happened in the open. Students who attended have already shared reflections there, and anyone who wants to keep contributing or stay connected can join the conversation.
You can check the events photos submitted here on Google photos(sorry that’s not FOSS:))
Cornelius Emase, Your Friend in Open Source(Open Source Freedom Fighter)
This period is open until Wednesday, 2025-11-26 at 23:59:59 UTC.
Candidates may self-nominate. If you nominate someone else, check with them first to ensure that they are willing to be nominated before submitting their name.
Nominees do not yet need to complete an interview. However, interviews are mandatory for all nominees. Nominees not having their interview ready by end of the Interview period (2025-12-03) will be disqualified and removed from the election. Nominees will submit questionnaire answers via a private Pagure issue after the nomination period closes on Wednesday, 2025-11-26. The F43 Election Wrangler (Justin Wheeler) will publish the interviews to the Community Blog before the start of the voting period on Friday, 2025-12-05.
The elected seats on FESCo are for a two-release term (approximately twelve months). For more information about FESCo, please visit the FESCo docs.
The full schedule of the elections is available on the Elections schedule. For more information about the elections, process see the Elections docs.
We have ongoing intermittent issues with the communication between the Fedora
proxies and the backend services. This manifests as intermittent 502 / 503
errors when talking to services such as Koji, Src, and so on.
We are working with the networking team to track it down, see the Pagure ticket
for …
Many services at our main datacenter are down/unresponsive.
There seems to be a networking event going on.
We are working with networking to track down and mitigate things.
Updates as they become available.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you with both an infographic and a text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in-depth details, look below the infographic.
Week: 03rd – 07th November 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day-to-day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces, etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
The Fedora community is coming together once again to celebrate the release of Fedora Linux 43, and you’re invited! Join us on Friday, November 21, 2025, from 13:00 to 16:00 UTC on Matrix for our virtual Fedora 43 Release Party.
This is our chance to celebrate the latest release, hear from contributors across the project, and see what’s new in Fedora Workstation, KDE, Atomic Desktops, and more. Whether you’re a long-time Fedora user or new to the community, it’s the perfect way to connect with the broader community, learn more about Fedora, and hang out in Matrix chat with your Fedora friends.
We have a lineup of talks and updates from across the Fedora ecosystem, including updates directly from teams who have been working on changes in this release. We’ll kick things off with Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta and Fedora Community Architect Justin Wheeler, followed by sessions with community members like Timothée Ravier on Atomic Desktops, Peter Boy and Petr Bokoč on the new Fedora Docs initiative, and Neal Gompa and Michel Lind discussing the Wayland-only GNOME experience. You’ll also hear from teams across Fedora sharing insights, demos, and what’s next for the project.
Registration is free but required to join the Matrix event room. Once registered, you’ll receive an invitation in your Matrix account before the event begins.
The official dates and location are set for Flock to Fedora 2026, the premier annual conference for Fedora Project contributors. The event will take place from 14-16 June 2026, in Prague, Czechia.
For Flock 2026, we are returning to the Vienna House by Wyndham Andel’s Prague, located at:
Stroupeznickeho 21 Prague, 150 00 Czech Republic
While all three days will be full conference days, the arrangement of the schedule will change slightly in 2026. Sunday, 14 June, will be designated as Day 0, featuring workshops, team meetups, and hands-on contributor sessions. The main conference activities, including streamed content, the opening keynote, and other sessions, are scheduled for Monday, 15 June, and Tuesday, 16 June.
Coordinated Scheduling with DevConf CZ
Following community feedback from last year, Flock 2026 has been scheduled to align more closely with DevConf.CZ. The conference will conclude just before DevConf.CZ begins in Brno (18-20 June 2026). This compressed travel schedule is intended to make it easier for community members who wish to attend both events.
Call for Proposals & Conference Themes
The Call for Proposals (CFP) for Flock 2026 will open in early December 2025 and close shortly after FOSDEM 2026 (31 January – 1 February). Speaker confirmations are scheduled to be sent in March 2026.
For Flock 2026, we are taking a more focused approach to session content. The Fedora Council, FESCo, and the Mindshare Committee are shaping key themes for the CFP. All presentation and workshop submissions should align with one of these themes. More details will be shared when the CFP opens.
Planning for Flock 2026
Here is what you need to know to plan your attendance:
Registration: Conference registration is scheduled to open in January 2026.
Sponsorship: Is your company or organization interested in sponsoring Flock 2026? Our sponsorship prospectus for Flock 2026 is now available on the Flock 2026 website. Organizations interested in supporting Flock and the Fedora community are encouraged to review the prospectus and contact the organizing team with any questions.
Hotel Block: A discounted block of rooms is arranged at the conference hotel. More information about the discounted hotel block can be found on the Flock website.
Travel Day & Connections: 17 June is designated as a free travel day between Flock to Fedora 2026 and DevConf.CZ. Frequent bus and train connections are available for travel between Prague and Brno.
Sponsored Travel: We intend to offer sponsored travel again for Flock to Fedora 2026. More details will follow in December 2025.
Get Involved & Ask Questions
The official Flock to Fedora 2026 Matrix room, #flock:fedoraproject.org, is the best place to connect with organizers and other community members. We encourage you to join the channel for the latest updates and to ask any questions you may have.
We recognize that returning to the same city and venue for a second consecutive year is a departure from Flock’s tradition. This decision was made intentionally with two key goals in mind.
First, by working with a familiar venue, our organizing team can optimize its processes and plan further in advance. This stability for Flock to Fedora 2026 will give us more opportunity to improve our internal processes and explore new ways to incorporate community input into the design of Fedora’s flagship contributor conference.
Second, this allows us to plan for a significant change in 2027. The Flock organizing team is committed to exploring new locations for Flock 2027, with a particular focus on regions outside of North America and Europe. We acknowledge the travel difficulties many of our contributors in regions like LATAM and APAC face. We learned valuable lessons from past planning cycles and are eager to achieve this goal, while also recognizing that unforeseen circumstances can impact our plans. We will work with community members in these regions to explore possible options and conduct thorough research on pricing and availability for 2027.
We look forward to seeing you in Prague for Flock 2026, 14-16 June.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 27 October – 31 October 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
Fedora Infra
Continue to work on timeout issue. Networking has some ideas for after f43 release.
Fedora Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to rebase to Fedora Linux 43 on your Fedora Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert things if something unforeseen happens.
Update your existing system
Prior to actually doing the rebase to Fedora Linux 43, you should apply any pending updates. Enter the following in the terminal:
$ rpm-ostree update
or install updates through GNOME Software and reboot.
Note
rpm-ostree is the underlying atomic technology that all the Fedora Atomic Desktops use. The techniques described here for Silverblue will apply to all of them with proper modifications for the appropriate desktop.
Rebasing using GNOME Software
GNOME Software shows you that there is new version of Fedora Linux available on the Updates screen.
First thing to do is download the new image, so select the Download button. This will take some time. When it is done you will see that the update is ready to install.
Select the Restart & Upgrade button. This step will take only a few moments and the computer will restart when the update has completed. After the restart you will end up in a new and shiny release of Fedora Linux 43. Easy, isn’t it?
Rebasing using terminal
If you prefer to do everything in a terminal, then this part of the guide is for you.
Rebasing to Fedora Linux 43 using the terminal is easy. First, check if the 43 branch is available:
$ ostree remote refs fedora
You should see the following in the output:
fedora:fedora/43/x86_64/silverblue
If you want to pin the current deployment (meaning that this deployment will stay as an option in GRUB until you remove it), you can do this by running this command:
# 0 is entry position in rpm-ostree status $ sudo ostree admin pin 0
To remove the pinned deployment use the following command:
# 2 is entry position in rpm-ostree status $ sudo ostree admin pin --unpin 2
Next, rebase your system to the Fedora Linux 43 branch.
$ rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/43/x86_64/silverblue
Finally, the last thing to do is restart your computer and boot to Fedora Linux 43.
How to roll back
If anything bad happens (for instance, if you can’t boot to Fedora Linux 43 at all) it’s easy to go back. At boot time, pick the entry in the GRUB menu for the version prior to Fedora Linux 43 and your system will start in that previous version rather than Fedora Linux 43. If you don’t see the GRUB menu, try to press ESC during boot. To make the change to the previous version permanent, use the following command:
$ rpm-ostree rollback
That’s it. Now you know how to rebase Fedora Silverblue to Fedora Linux 43 and roll back. So why not do it today?
Because there are similar questions in comments for each blog about rebasing to newer version of Silverblue I will try to answer them in this section.
Question: Can I skip versions during rebase of Fedora? For example from Fedora 40 Silverblue to Fedora 43 Silverblue?
Answer: Although it could sometimes be possible to skip versions during rebase, it is not recommended. You should always update to one version above (40->41->42->43 for example) to avoid unnecessary errors.
Question: I have rpm-fusion layered and I get errors during rebase. How should I do the rebase?
Answer: If you have rpm-fusion layered on your Silverblue installation, you should do the following before rebase:
After doing this you can follow the guide in this blog post.
Question: Could this guide be used for other ostree editions (Fedora Atomic Desktops) as well like Kinoite, Sericea (Sway Atomic), Onyx (Budgie Atomic),…?
Yes, you can follow the Rebasing using the terminal part of this guide for every Fedora Atomic Desktop. Just use the corresponding branch. For example, for Kinoite use fedora:fedora/43/x86_64/kinoite
I’m excited to announce my very first Fedora Linux release as the new Fedora Project Leader. Fedora Linux 43 is here! 43 releases! Wow that’s a lot. I was thinking about proposing special tetracontakaitrigon stickers to celebrate this release, but I’m not sure anyone would notice they weren’t circles.
Thank you and congrats to everyone who has contributed to Fedora to this release, and in all the releases leading up to this one. I’m grateful to be back with a chance to take stewardship of the collaboration as the Fedora Project leader. I’ve been getting my feet under me as much as I can in these first few months. I’m looking forward to writing up some longer missives about where I want to steer this ship, but for right now I just want to highlight some of the changes you should expect to encounter in the latest release of Fedora Linux. Read the highlights below to find out more. Or if you are ready just jump right in!
Upgrade
If you have an existing system, Upgrading Fedora Linux to a New Release is easy. In most cases, it’s not very different from just rebooting for regular updates, except you’ll have a little more time to grab a coffee.
As usual, with Fedora, there are just too many individual changes and improvements to go over in detail. You’ll want to take a look at the release notes for that.
Notable User Visible Changes
There are, however, a few notable user visible changes in this release. For those of you installing fresh Fedora Linux 43 Spins, you may be greeted with the new Anaconda WebUI. This was the default installer interface for Fedora Workstation 42, and now it’s the default installer UI for the Spins as well.
If you are a GNOME desktop user, you’ll also notice that the GNOME is now Wayland-only in Fedora Linux 43. GNOME upstream has deprecated X11 support, and has disabled it as a compile time default in GNOME 49. Upstream GNOME plans to fully remove X11 support in GNOME 50.
Plumbing Upgrades
Beyond the user-visible changes, there are a couple of significant bits of plumbing that should go unnoticed for most users but are a big deal, nonetheless.
Fedora Linux 43 will be the first release with RPM 6.0. Like I said, this should go unnoticed to end-users, but it is a significant change. RPM 6.0 provides some interesting security enhancements, like multiple key signing of packages. This should help future-proof package signing as we transition to post-quantum-crypto OpenPGP keys in future releases.
We’re also moving forward with our bootc enablement story. Fedora CoreOS is now buildable from a Fedora base bootc image using a Containerfile, instead of needing to be composed with a custom tool. That means anyone with podman can build the Fedora CoreOS image, whether manually or via CI/CD automation.
Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) is also changing how it’s issuing updates to users in Fedora 43. Instead of using an OSTree repository, FCOS updates will be delivered exclusively as OCI images. FCOS 42 provided both OSTree repository and OCI registry as a transition for users. In FCOS 43, the OSTree updates are disabled entirely.
Save the Date: Fedora Linux 43 Release Party!
To celebrate all this incredible community work, we’ll be hosting a virtual Fedora Linux 43 Release Party! Please save the date for Friday, 21 November. We’re still finalizing the schedule and speakers, so registration isn’t open just yet, but more details will be shared soon. You can keep an eye on the Fedora Linux 43 Release Party Schedule wiki page for the latest updates!
If you hit a snag
If you run into a problem, visit our Ask Fedora user support forum. This forum includes a category where we collect common issues and solutions or work-arounds.
Just drop by and say “hello”
Drop by our “virtual watercooler” on Fedora Discussion and join a conversation, share something interesting, and introduce yourself. We’re always glad to see new people!
Below are a few noteworthy changes in the latest release of Fedora Workstation that we think you will love. Upgrade today from the official website, or upgrade your existing install using GNOME Software or through the terminal with dnf system-upgrade.
GNOME 49
Fedora Linux 43 Workstation also ships with the brand-new GNOME 49 release, bringing a host of refinements to your desktop. This update introduces significant enhancements for multiple display setups, an improved and streamlined workflow for taking screenshots and screen recordings, and a new “Focus Mode” to help you minimize distractions. Under the hood, resource-smart background throttling improves performance and battery life, while the Settings app has been polished with a refined UI. These are just the highlights. Check out the official GNOME 49 release notes to find more information about all the new features.
Wayland-only GNOME
One significant change we want to forewarn you about is that Fedora Linux 43 is removing the GNOME X11 packages from the Fedora repositories. All users of the GNOME X11 session will be migrated to the GNOME Wayland session with the upgrade to Fedora Workstation 43.
The transition to the GNOME Wayland session in Fedora Workstation 43 has been in the works for nearly a decade. There have been several prior steps toward this goal, such as the work in Fedora Linux 41 to remove legacy X11 dependencies from core media components.
Wayland has been the default GNOME session on Fedora Workstation for many years, but this release completes the change. The legacy gnome-session-xsession packages have been removed from the Fedora Linux 43 repositories.
This change will unlock a new level of performance and hardware compatibility. You’ll immediately notice smoother, cleaner visuals thanks to triple buffering, which dramatically reduces screen tearing. This change also improves support for a range of hardware, including enhanced drivers for Intel Xe graphics and improvements for systems using NVIDIA Optimus and Hybrid Mode.
A new default video player — Showtime
The default video player has been changed from Totem to Showtime. Showtime is built on the newer GTK 4 and Libadwaita libraries.
Use COLR for Noto Color Emoji
The Noto Color Emoji fonts have released some new files with the COLRv1 format. The COLRv1 format is a color scalable font compared with the previous color bitmap fonts. This new scalable font format should have better or similar rendering results compared to the old bitmap font format. See the change notes for more details.
Peas 2.0
If you are an app developer, you might be interested in the upgrade to Peas 2. Peas is a gobject-based plugins engine that is used by several GNOME applications.
Fedora Linux 43 has been released! So, let’s see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic).
Changes for all variants
zstd compressed initrds
Alongside the rest of Fedora, we are now compressing our initrds with the Zstandard (zstd) algorithm. This should make the initrd a bit smaller and the boot a bit faster.
Along with the rest of Fedora, systems will install with a 2GB /boot partition. This should make things easier with the growing initrd sizes (mostly due to firmwares). Existing systems will require a backup and re-install to benefit from this change.
We are adding the wireguard-tools to all variants. Users will still need to use the graphic interface in their desktop environment to configure WireGuard connections. However, it should now be easier to debug issues using the wg tool. This change was decided too late to be included in the installation ISO but it will come via an update.
We temporarily removed the Third Party page shown during the first boot as it was causing issues. Users will be asked if they want to enable Third Party repositories when they open GNOME Software.
This will be re-enabled once we figure out where the bug is.
Updates will now be automatically applied on a weekly basis, for Flatpaks and the system. You can configure the frequency or disable auto-updates in the system settings.
As always, I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA drivers, extra media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).
We have established a roadmap (atomic-desktops-sig#26) and we need your help to make this a smooth transition for all of our existing users.
New home for the Fedora sysexts
We have moved the systemd system extensions (sysexts) to a new GitHub organization. The sysexts are now split between those built exclusively from Fedora packages and those built from various community sources. Make sure to update your systemd-sysupdate configs to point to the new URLs.
Fedora has released Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition 43 to the public.
The Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition is well suited for many needs. It combines the reliable and trusted Fedora Linux base with the KDE Plasma Desktop environment. It provides a selection of KDE applications that are simple by default, but powerful when needed.
KDE Plasma 6.4
KDE developers continue to release new features, fix bugs and fine-tune the desktop experience to improve on the now well-established foundation of Plasma 6.
Fedora KDE 43 ships with Plasma 6.4.5 featuring:
More flexible tiling. You are able to choose a different tile layout for each of your virtual desktops.
New Spectacle. Spectacle, Plasma’s screenshot tool, got a complete overhaul.
Color Management. The Display and Monitor page in System settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard.
Accessibility. You can now move the pointer using your keyboard’s number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.
Notifications. When any applications are in full screen mode, Plasma will enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full screen mode, you’ll see a summary of any notifications you missed, and they’ll be right there in the System Tray for your perusal.
Apps. The Application Launcher will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: 20th – 24th October 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
We in the CLE team and wider Fedora infra space have been talking about the future of Fedora’s development infrastructure for a while. Now it is starting to take shape, as Ryan outlined in the soft launch blog post: Both staging and production Forgejo instances are up and running in the RDU3 datacenter. That means the work of moving away from pagure.io is no longer theoretical. It is happening.
If you have a project on Pagure, you can already open a migration ticket, as described in the Forge documentation, and we will help you move it over. But this is not just about swapping one forge for another. Forgejo gives us a chance to modernize some of the core parts of Fedora’s packaging workflows, such as how we handle ownership, where we store artifacts, and how we integrate automation.
Let us take a closer look.
Automation, Actions, and CI
One of the first questions we hear is: What about CI/CD?
Forgejo upstream recommends Woodpecker/Raven, which are full CI/CD systems. These are powerful, but they are also heavy and expensive to maintain. Fedora is going to take a different approach.
We are focusing on Forgejo Actions, which are somehow API compatible with GitHub Actions(It is not a 1:1 replacement).
This allows contributors to:
Automate ticket and pull request workflows
Run small repo-local tasks such as linting, simple checks, or doc generation.
Trigger jobs in external services like COPR or Jenkins
For those who want to run heavy workloads, such as large test suites or extensive CI pipelines. You can connect your own self-hosted runners, while the shared Fedora infrastructure will stay lightweight, stable, and dependable. The CLE team won’t provide resources within Fedora’s Forgejo infrastructure.
Rethinking Dist-Git
There was an engaging discussion about dist-git at this year’s Flock, and one message came through clearly: as we move forward, we should take the opportunity to improve the model rather than simply replicate it. The conversation focused on three key areas: package ownership, artifact storage, and Packit integration.
Modernizing Access Control and Contribution Workflows
A central theme of our discussion was how we manage permissions and contributions in a way that is both secure and efficient. The goal is to leverage Forgejo’s powerful features to refine our processes.
Key takeaways include:
A Shift to Merge Requests: There is strong momentum to make Merge Requests (MRs) the default contribution method for everyone. This “review-first” approach ensures that all changes to our packages benefit from peer review, improving code quality and stability.
Redefining the “Proven Packager” Role: We recognize the immense value and trust placed in our Proven Packagers. Instead of a direct-push model, we are exploring how this role can evolve within a merge-request workflow. A formal policy proposal for this is already being drafted.
Hardening Our Security: There was a unanimous agreement to enforce “hard rules” against rewriting git history. Force pushes to primary branches will be disabled across the board to protect the integrity of our repositories.
Granular Permissions: Forgejo will allow us to set fine-grained permissions for different actions. We plan to separate the ability to change package content from the ability to change repository configuration, adding another layer of security.
Right now, all Fedora packages officially belong to the Fedora Project, but the daily reality is a patchwork of individual maintainers and teams. This works, but it leaves gaps.
Permissions are all or nothing. You either have commit rights or you do not.
It is not always clear who is responsible for a package at any given time.
Onboarding new maintainers or transferring ownership when someone steps back is often manual and slow.
Critical packages such as toolchains affect the whole distribution, but our ownership model does not reflect that impact.
Forgejo lets us improve this. With its more flexible permissions, we can introduce roles such as maintainer, co-maintainer, or limited contributor. Groups can own packages as first-class entities.
Artifact storage
Today, the package build process relies on the Lookaside Cache. It is simple, but it is also dated. It struggles with very large artifacts, it separates code and artifacts, and it does not integrate well with modern workflows.
Several options are on the table:
Using git lfs: An industry-standard solution for storing large files in Git. While it integrates cleanly with Forgejo, it’s not compatible with mirroring infrastructure.
Leveraging Forgejo’s Package Registry: We could repurpose Forgejo’s built-in registry to store source tarballs. While it sounds wonderful to solve all the problems with one tool. We would be misusing the feature and need to maintain compatibility.
A Radically Simpler Approach: Some suggested moving away from a separate cache entirely, embracing a “source git” model where we work directly with forks of upstream projects.
This is a complex decision with long-term implications. No decision has been made yet. We are committed to a transparent process and will submit a formal Change Proposal to the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) before any major architectural change is implemented, ensuring the entire community can weigh in.
Packit integration
Packit is essential for connecting upstream projects to Fedora packaging. It automates updates, tests, and workflows that save maintainers huge amounts of time.
On Pagure, Packit integration was always custom. On GitHub and GitLab, it is native. This gap created extra work and sometimes rougher edges for Fedora contributors.
The Packit team already prototyped Forgejo support during Google Summer of Code. The service is called Avant, and it’s in our sights as one of the first integration testing areas in staging deployment.
The next steps are:
Deploy Forgejo in staging and provide Packit with a service account
Collect feedback from maintainers on real workflows.
Reach feature parity with GitHub and GitLab support.
The long-term goal is clear. Packit in Forgejo should feel natural and seamless, not bolted on.
Konflux Integration
Some of Fedora’s container builds run through Konflux. Right now, Konflux only supports GitHub and GitLab. To make it work with Forgejo, we built a workaround that mirrors repositories into GitHub. It works, but it is fragile and wasteful.
The better solution is native Forgejo integration. That means upstream changes in Konflux, secure authentication, and removing the mirroring step entirely. Until then, the GitHub workaround will stay in place, but long-term, the focus is on a direct, reliable path.
Building a Compatibility Bridge
A migration like this cannot happen overnight. We need to keep workflows running while the move happens. To do this, we are building a compatibility bridge.
The bridge includes:
A metaservice that translates Pagure-style API calls into Forgejo’s API
New artifact storage, currently in the Lookaside Cache
A phased rollout: first internal scripts, then external tools, and finally contributor-facing workflows
Incremental testing in staging before production cutovers
The goal is continuity. Contributors should be able to keep working while the infrastructure gradually changes behind the scenes.
Tooling Compatibility
Fedora’s ecosystem depends on many tools that integrate with dist-git. Each needs some level of adjustment.
Bodhi will need to adapt to the new repository metadata.
COPR will need changes to fetch SRPMs directly from Forgejo
Packit integration is a priority and is being developed in parallel.
Fedpkg and release engineering scripts will be updated first since they are under Fedora control.
CI systems, Anitya, Toddlers, Notifications, Monitor Gating, and others will need targeted updates to remove assumptions about Pagure.
The approach is simple. During the transition, a compatibility layer keeps these tools running. Once Forgejo support is mature, the tools can be updated to use Forgejo directly.
What is Next
This migration is not just an infrastructure swap. It is a chance to fix long-standing pain points, simplify workflows, and make Fedora’s packaging system stronger for the future.
By the end of the Year, I expect us to be able to:
Have runners and actions in production
Move about 80% of non-source projects to forge.fp.o
Nice to have:
Some outcomes from Package ownership and Artifact storage discussions
Staging deployment of Forgejo, let’s temporarily call it “packagers’ forge”
Staging environments for Packit and Actions of the packagers’ forge deployment
Roadmaps for Konflux and the compatibility bridge
Fedora thrives on collaboration. Forgejo is our next step toward a modern, maintainable, and community-driven development platform.
Join us in shaping it together, try the staging environment, file migration ticket, and share your feedback in our matrix channel for ideas and discussion, use the git-forge-future tag.
This is a weekly report from the I&R (Infrastructure & Release Engineering) Team. We provide you both infographic and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.
Week: Oct 13 – Oct 17 2025
Infrastructure & Release Engineering
The purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work. It’s responsible for services running in Fedora and CentOS infrastructure and preparing things for the new Fedora release (mirrors, mass branching, new namespaces etc.). List of planned/in-progress issues
︎
NOTE
AI Pro 7 ( Ryzen
LLM output 
Problem Summary
Likely Root Causes
Diagnostic Checklist
Quick‑Fix Path (Try in this order)
Advanced Debugging (if basic fixes don’t help)
Bottom Line
So, time to upgrade.
New Election Schedule
You attended the F43 Virtual Release Party!
You dropped by the Fedora booth at FOSDEM '26
”
You helped solidify the core for the Fedora 43 rebase!
Participated in the Fedora 43 Elections!
Participated in the Fedora 47 Elections!
Participated in the Fedora 46 Elections!
Participated in the Fedora 45 Elections!
Participated in the Fedora 44 Elections!
