Christian F.K. Schaller, Director of Software Engineering at Red Hat, says the company is working to integrate IBM’s AI models into Fedora Workstation and GNOME.

IBM, which owns Red Hat, has been developing its Granite line of AI models, designed specifically for business applications. IBM has released Granite 3.0, its latest version, under the Apache 2.0 license, a permissive license that makes it ideal for open source projects.

Schaller says Red Hat is working to incorporate Granite into Fedora and GNOME, giving Linux users access to a variety of AI-powered tools.

One big item on our list for the year is looking at ways Fedora Workstation can make use of artificial intelligence. Thanks to IBMs Granite effort we know have an AI engine that is available under proper open source licensing terms and which can be extended for many different usecases. Also the IBM Granite team has an aggressive plan for releasing updated versions of Granite, incorporating new features of special interest to developers, like making Granite a great engine to power IDEs and similar tools. We been brainstorming various ideas in the team for how we can make use of AI to provide improved or new features to users of GNOME and Fedora Workstation. This includes making sure Fedora Workstation users have access to great tools like RamaLama, that we make sure setting up accelerated AI inside Toolbx is simple, that we offer a good Code Assistant based on Granite and that we come up with other cool integration points.

Wayland Improvements

Schaller goes on to detail several other improvements, starting with Wayland, the successor to the X11 window manager. Last year saw a bit of drama with Wayland development, with GNOME developers often accused of holding up progress, or blocking protocols they don’t see a need for within GNOME itself.

Schaller addresses those issues, highlighting the value of the “ext” namespace for extensions to Wayland that may not appeal to every desktop environment, but still serve a valuable purpose for some.

The Wayland community had some challenges last year with frustrations boiling over a few times due to new protocol development taking a long time. Some of it was simply the challenge of finding enough people across multiple projects having the time to follow up and help review while other parts are genuine disagreements of what kind of things should be Wayland protocols or not. That said I think that problem has been somewhat resolved with a general understanding now that we have the ‘ext’ namespace for a reason, to allow people to have a space to review and make protocols without an expectation that they will be universally implemented. This allows for protocols of interest only to a subset of the community going into ‘ext’ and thus allowing protocols that might not be of interest to GNOME and KDE for instance to still have a place to live.

Flatpak Improvements

Similarly, Flatpak saw major improvements in 2024. Flatpak is a containerized application format that includes all necessary dependencies, rather than rely on the underlying system. As a result, Flatpak is ideal for installing the latest and greatest version of a package—even on stable releases like Debian—without worrying about conflicts or risking destabilizing the system.

Because of its containerized nature, however, Flatpaks have traditionally had some limitations, such as connecting to USB devices. Schaller highlights the progress that was made, thanks to the USB portal implementation.

Some major improvements to the Flatpak stack has happened recently with the USB portal merged upstream. The USB portal came out of the Sovereign fund funding for GNOME and it gives us a more secure way to give sandboxed applications access to you USB devcices. In a somewhat related note we are still working on making system daemons installable through Flatpak, with the usecase being applications that has a system daemon to communicate with a specific piece of hardware for example (usually through USB). Christian Hergert got this on his todo list, but we are at the moment waiting for Lennart Poettering to merge some pre-requisite work into systemd that we want to base this on.

Other Improvements

Schaller touts the additional improvements being made, including to High Dynamic Range (HDR), PipeWire audio server, MIPI camera support, accessibility, Firefox, and the GNOME Software software app.

Fedora’s developers have made it clear that they want the distro, which serves as an upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to be “the best community platform for AI.” Integrating IBM’s Granite is a major step in that direction.