After about a month of testing, the full release of Fedora Linux 42 is finally here, bringing with it a bunch of upgrades and improvements for all of its many spins and editions.
If you’re using the flagship Fedora Workstation and you upgrade to 42, you’ll find yourself boosted to GNOME 48, nicknamed “Bengaluru.” That change will bring you things like improved HDR support, a “Wellbeing” screen time manager, and a battery health preservation tool. Wayland is also now the default for SDL apps, so you’ll be getting a more Wayland-ified experience with Fedora 42.
As anticipated in the Fedora 42 beta, the installation experience has also been overhauled. Among the many changes is a simplification, in that you have fewer configuration tasks on the front-end of the experience. I gave it a try myself and was pleasantly surprised by how straightforward and frictionless the installation process was. Things like choosing a hostname and root password are now saved for post-installation. That might seem like a arbitrary arbitrary change, but I can see it being nice if you want to install Fedora on a friend’s computer for them but want to leave the administration of it up to them.
Another of the more exciting updates is that the Fedora 42 release includes two COSMIC spins. In Fedora lingo, a spin is just another version of Fedora with a different desktop environment and/or underlying system. COSMIC is notable as a new kid on the block in the Linux desktop environment world. It was developed by System76 for its Pop!_OS distro, while also making it open source and available to any other distros that want to carry it. It’s based on Rust, and while COSMIC is still technically in an alpha testing phase, that hasn’t stopped Fedora and others from putting out ready-made distros with it.
In fact, you can get Fedora 42 in a bunch of different editions and spins with various desktop environments. A major one is Silverblue, which is like Workstation but with an underlying system that’s “immutable.” The immutable editions and spins, also called “atomic” Fedora, are all having their default Linux file system changed over to composefs. Typically when you install a Linux distribution it’s going to use ext4 or btrfs, but the switch to composefs is what Fedora is calling an “important first step towards better integrity for the system content.”
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There are a ton more minor changes too numerous to cover here, including several unique to specific spins. Fedora Xfce, for example, now has experimental Wayland support, and Budgie Atomic now uses Plasma Discover as its default software manager. Be sure to check out the latest Fedora release notes for more.
You have a lot to choose from if you decide to give Fedora 42 a try, including not just the atomic versions but a bunch of others like Fedora Cinnamon, MiracleWM, and Xfce. Personally I’ve used Fedora with KDE Plasma in the past, and thought it was serviceable, but I ultimately decided I preferred the Arch approach to package management. Interestingly, the KDE spin has been upgraded to “edition” status with Fedora 42, meaning it has extra polish and broader architecture support now. Maybe I ought to give it another try. That said, Workstation is essentially the flagship edition, should you want to get the “vanilla” experience and its GNOME desktop environment.
It’s ultimately up to you which one you choose. Whichever you do, you’ll get it from Fedora’s website. You’ll then want to learn how to install Linux on bare metal or, to be safer, spin it up as a virtual machine.
If you’re already using Fedora 41, you can simply upgrade your system following Fedora’s upgrade-in-place guide.
Source: Fedora Magazine
