Fedora 42 is now in beta testing, with more desktops and editions than ever.
So far, there are GNOME and KDE graphical workstation editions, plus Server, Cloud, and IoT, and there's a "Next" preview for Fedora CoreOS. The KDE spin has been promoted to full Edition status. Among other things, this means a complete PowerPC64LE version, including all the KDE apps. However, every silver lining must have a cloud, and in this case it's that there are no more Fedora Atomic desktop versions on POWER.
GNOME 48 Settings screen showing the About page with Fedora logo.
Fedora 42 features the shiny new GNOME 48, and ran well even on a geriatric test laptop – click to enlarge
Among the highlights of this release is a new installer. At this point, you'll only see this on the Workstation Live image, but it will make its way to the other editions in time. And there are some small glitches – for instance, you need to enter locale information during setup, and again when GNOME 48 starts for the first time – but the new "webUI" installer is there; it works, and we feel it's an improvement. For now, the other editions use the old "gtkUI" installer.
We tried the beta on hardware the day after it was released, when it needed about a gigabyte of updates post-install, and then again in a VM the next day, when the volume of updates went up to about 1.2 GB. The OS is still visibly in active development. For instance, when it's first installed, it has a test version of GNOME 48, but once updated, you get a newer build – with the new GNOME Adwaita fonts. This sort of niggle will be polished away before release.
The GNOME edition now defaults to Wayland and nothing but Wayland. We installed X.org and the gnome-session-xsession package in an effort to try it under X11, but with no joy. The only options on the login screen were GNOME and GNOME Classic. Because GNOME 48 claims to look and work better on low-end hardware, we tried the beta on one of the lowest-spec machines in The Reg FOSS desk test fleet – a 2008 Lenovo ThinkPad X301. We had to enable "safe graphics" to get it to boot, and that limited us to 1024x768 and software rendering. We edited /etc/default/grub and removed nomodeset from the kernel command line, and suddenly, the machine's Intel GMA 4500 GPU started working, the display flipped to a pin-sharp 1440x900 and GNOME became surprisingly fluid and responsive for a 17-year-old machine. We were honestly impressed at how well it worked.
GNOME overview showing the opening screen of the welcome tour application.
Fedora as ever has a pretty much unmodified version of GNOME except for the wallpapers and the name in the welcome tour – click to enlarge
There's also a whole new spin, featuring the new COSMIC desktop from System76. This has been in development for a long time, but it's getting close. We took a look at the alpha test version back in September. We couldn't find a beta download of the new spin, so we installed it on the GNOME edition. The result is quite impressive. A further six months of development shows it now feels more complete and better-integrated. Cosmetically, it can't match GNOME's level of polish, but it works and it's fast. It's still quite GNOME-like, but unlike in GNOME itself, you get separate control icons for things like sound, networking, and power in the top panel, and you can choose a vertical dock at left or right if you prefer, which we do. We felt a little more in control over our desktop with COSMIC compared to GNOME, and even on low-end hardware, the performance was good. We suspect that when COSMIC gets to release status, GNOME may suddenly have some catching up to do.
Even on our elderly, legacy-BIOS-only hardware, Fedora 42 insisted on partitioning the X301's tiny 120 GB SSD with a GUID Partition Table (GPT). The machine was previously running Void Linux, but we couldn't reuse the existing partitions, as they were on an MBR partition table. For most users this will make no difference at all, but it does mean you can forget about dual-booting Fedora 42 with some older OSes – such as 32-bit Windows, or any version in legacy-boot mode.
We were a little surprised to find the beta was using a pre-release Linux kernel, version 6.14.0-rc7. As we mentioned recently, some bcachefs issues may delay the final release of 6.14, but it will surely be out before Fedora 42 hits final release. (We are still wondering if the team will hold on to this particular version until Towel Day, but that may be too late: it's on May 25 each year.)
Red Hat's official announcement has more info about what's to come on the server and developer side of things. Other under-the-hood changes include a new file system for media images and new versions of the package management tools RPM and DNF. For specific package versions and the most detailed info, there's a full list of changes here. ®