The Fedora Project is soliciting feedback from its user and developer community on the possibility of updating its release standards so that they no longer block disc boot issues (DVD images) and whether to continue to treat dual-boot issues on Intel-based Macs as a release blocker.
The first suggestion raised was whether to drop support for CD booting from the Fedora release standards. This involves Fedora distribution installer images, which must be written to a compact disc (DVD) before they can be booted. Fedora officially stopped testing disc support in 2020, and they are currently considering making it no longer block any reported issues:
As of 2020, quality teams are no longer required to test optical media, but any issues discovered may still be a hindrance. We don't really like this solution (blocking content we haven't tested), but testing optical activation is just too time-consuming and already niche. Five years later, we decided it was time to abandon the entire standard. The importance of optical boot is long gone, and we think it's time to remove it from the "key features list" called release criteria. This wouldn't save us much time (I don't recall any high-profile optical boot issues in the past few years), but it would simplify our test matrix a bit (making it easier to read), resolve the conflict between release blocking status and quality coverage, and if a problem is discovered, it would allow us to discard DVD drives and media that are still ready (but may no longer be usable).
The second proposal is about removing the dual-boot release standard for Intel-based Apple MacBooks. Current publishing standards state that the Fedora installer must be able to dual-boot/install into available space with an existing macOS installation on an Intel-based Mac computer.
"This standard is being phased out over time, as Apple stopped making Intel-based Macs years ago (replacing them with "Apple Silicon" M* processors, which are not currently supported by Fedora). The last few MacBooks that could reasonably use Fedora were the 2017 models, which still included the T1 security chip (newer models have T2 chips, and their internal keyboards and touchpads don't work with the Fedora kernel). 2017 System update support for 2017 models will end this year, and older models are obsolete. This means that users of pre-2017 models may have switched to Fedora if they wanted to, and there will be no such users in the future because their hardware is not well supported by Fedora.”
This primarily concerns Apple Macs from 2017 and earlier, as newer Apple Macs with the T2 security chip currently don't run well on Fedora Linux. This does not affect any changes to Apple Silicon Macs, only Intel x86_64 systems.
Since the Fedora quality team currently has less access to the remaining Intel Macs and is able to devote less time to fixing any issues with these older systems, the desire now is not to see any Apple Mac dual-boot issues as release roadblocks.
