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The Fedora Project announced today the release and general availability for download of the beta version of the upcoming Fedora Linux 40 operating system featuring some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies.
Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 40 beta is here to showcase the recently released GNOME 46 desktop environment on the flagship Fedora Workstation edition, as well as the latest KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment on the Fedora KDE Spin.
The Fedora KDE Spin now ships with Plasma Wayland as the default session as support for the X11 session has been removed entirely from this edition, but X11 apps will still work. The rest of the Fedora Linux 40 editions ship with X11 and Wayland (if supported by the desktop environment) sessions. Here’s the Fedora KDE Spin in action!
Other noteworthy changes in Fedora Linux 40 include the enablement of IPv4 address conflict detection by default, stable-ssid as the default mode for assigning individual stable MAC addresses to Wi-Fi connections in NetworkManager, the PyTorch open-source machine learning framework, as well as enablement of systemd service hardening features for default system services.
Fedora Linux 40 changes the DNF behavior to no longer download filelists by default, replaces Zlib with Zlib-ng, minizip with minizip-ng, wget with wget2, and iotop with iotop-c, and drops Delta RPMs and disables support in the default configuration of DNF / DNF5.
It will also remove the deprecated libuser library, and the passwd package, which will be shipped from shadow-utils instead, as well as the deprecated OpenSSL 1.1 and Python 3.7 packages. Also deprecated is the NTLM authentication as a SASL mechanism.
Under the hood, Fedora Linux 40 beta comes with an up-to-date GNU toolchain consisting of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 14.0, GNU Binutils 2.41, GNU C Library (Glibc) 2.39, GDB (GNU Debugger) 14.1, Golang 1.22, LLVM 18, Boost 1.83, Ruby 3.3, Podman 5, PostgreSQL 16, PHP 8.3, Kubernetes 1.29, and IBus 1.5.30.
The Fedora Linux 40 Workstation live ISO will be built with Image Builder, while the entire distribution will be built with DNF 5 and ported to modern C standards. In addition, the /var/run selinux-policy entries were moved to /run, and support for unified kernels has been improved to add support for booting UKIs directly, enable UKIs for the AArch64 architecture, and add a UEFI-only cloud image variant that uses UKIs.
For AMD GPUs, Fedora Linux 40 ships with AMD ROCm 6.0 as the latest release of AMD’s software optimized for AI and HPC workload performance, which enables support for the newest flagship AMD Instinct MI300A and MI300X datacenter GPUs.
Of course, Fedora Linux 40 will ship with an up-to-date default software selection that includes the latest LibreOffice 24.2 office suite and Mozilla Firefox 124 web browser, the latter shipping with an updated desktop file to comply with the DBus/GNOME search provider rules.
Notable changes in the official Fedora Linux Spins include the latest Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment for the Fedora Cinnamon Spin, while Fedora IoT uses OSTree to provide an OS suitable for Edge and IoT use cases.
Moreover, Fedora IoT will ship with a new, non-release blocking deliverable to deploy and configure Fedora IoT systems using a new tool called Simplified Provisioning. Also, the Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite editions will use bootupd to manage bootloader updates.
Last but not least, with Fedora Linux 40, the Fedora Project gathers all rpm-ostree based variants of Fedora Linux under a single umbrella called Fedora Atomic Desktops, which consists of Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, Fedora Sway Atomic, and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
The final release of Fedora Linux 40 is expected sometime in late April or early May 2024. Until then, you can download the beta version right now from the official website, but keep in mind that it may contain unresolved bugs or unfinished features so do not install it on a production system.
Unfortunately, Fedora Linux 40 will not feature the DNF5 package manager, which provides users with faster package management, nor the Anaconda WebUI installer for the Fedora Workstation edition. Both features have been delayed for a future release, probably Fedora Linux 41.
Last updated 1 month ago
