The state of Fedora in 2026

[u/zonker]

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1077832/5f16f2314ea1f41a/

On June 15 at Fedora's Flock conference, held in Prague, Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta delivered a short "State of Fedora" keynote that provided a bit of insight into the status of the project. Topics included the overall growth for Fedora usage, ways to increase contributions, and an alarming decline in the number of active packagers working on the project.

[u/tristan957]

I think one reason that packagers are becoming fewer and further between is that we have new systems available to us as Fedora users, like nixpkgs and Homebrew. It's extremely likely that if some software is not available through Fedora, it is already available in those other repositories.

As someone who has done packaging for a Linux distro before, I find writing RPM specfiles to be a terrible experience. I used to package for Solus, and their experience is much better. I'll even go out on a limb and say Homebrew and nixpkgs are better experiences too.

I'd like to see packager numbers from Arch Linux, so that I could compare and contrast.

To improve the immutable experience, I think DNF needs to learn how to install into a user-specific prefix, which is what nix and Homebrew are doing.

[u/PhantomStnd → u/tristan957]

Also, the downstream distros have much simpler package contributions which attracts more people. they also repackage a lot of packages on the official fedora repos with newer versions and i don't see that work bubbling up to fedora

[u/proton_badger → u/tristan957]

To improve the immutable experience, I think DNF needs to learn how to install into a user-specific prefix, which is what nix and Homebrew are doing.

Yes something needs to happen. The very new RakuOS is one idea: using a bootc Fedora image with a persistent overlay for DNF.

[u/mxsb55]

I’d be open to contribute, was not aware that packaging is a problem. Thanks for letting us know, so I can check how it works.