Fedora Linux 40 Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: Fedora Linux 40 distribution has been officially released -- powered by the latest Linux 6.8 kernel series, and featuring the GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6 desktop environments, reports 9to5Linux:

"Powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.8 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 40 release ships with the GNOME 46 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition and the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Spin, which defaults to the Wayland session as the X11 session was completely removed."

"Fedora Linux 40 also includes some interesting package management changes, such as dropping Delta RPMs and disabling support in the default configuration of DNF / DNF5. It also changes the DNF behavior to no longer download filelists by default. However, this release doesn't ship with the long-awaited DNF5 package manager. 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."

DNF package manager?

[serviscope_minor]

It didn't ship the DNF package manager. Does that stand for "did not finish"?

It includes DNF, just not DNF5

[_merlin]

They replaced yum (Yellow Dog Update Modified) with DNF years ago, after they decided maintaining yum was too hard and it was easier to write a replacement from scratch. They just haven't managed to get the new DNF5 production ready. I don't know what the big changes in DNF5 over older versions of DNF are supposed to be.

DNF, like yum before it, uses RPM package management under the hood. It's mostly a tool for dealing with package repositories, notifying the user about updates, etc.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Oh that's a shame: my cheap joke didn't work.

All sounds great butâ¦

[ZERO1ZERO]

All sounds great but what sure any of it mean?

GNOME 46 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition

I thought gnome was universally hated? Is it true that this is flagship workstation worthy?

and the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Spin

kde spin? Is this a toy version? Is it like windows home vs pro? For gamers? Non tech users? Dunno why you wouldnâ(TM)t just use the Flagship gnome 46 version above

which defaults to the Wayland session as the X11 sessi

Re:

[Tailhook]

KDE has to be a thing for Fedora because there are a lot of KDE loyalists and distros really can't just forgo supporting them. KDE really is very good and its followers aren't going to tolerate Gnome. Canonical tried to kill Kubuntu in 2012, pulling funding and official support. Kubuntu not only survived it's thriving and is the best choice for Ubuntu based desktops today. Then there is SUSE, which has been tier 1 KDE since forever.

Re: All sounds great butâ¦

[drinkypoo]

Did they fix in version 6 the KDE bug that was causing some programs running under wine to only run when they were not in the foreground? I left plasma 5 for XFCE over that. As a side benefit, Thunar has sane drag and drop behavior.

Re:

[caseih]

This was a KDE Wayland bug? I've never encountered in X11 with KDE 5.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Nope, I have yet to ever run Wayland. I'm still on good old X. It happened with my 970, it happened with my 1070, and it happened with my 4060. And then I went to XFCE4 with Compiz (with the emerald decorator.) I still have KDE installed and occasionally use some kwhatever app.

Anyway I had this problem with several games, across wine, proton, and proton-ge. Mostly with games that were bitchy about alt-tab. I tried it with and without focus protection, too. But ultimately it just boiled down to being KDE, an

Re:

[caseih]

There's actually a proposal before the Fedora steering committee to change the default desktop in Fedora from Gnome to KDE. It's quite a serious proposal: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki... [fedoraproject.org]

I don't think it will gain traction, though.

Re:

[youngone]

As long as I can get a Gnome desktop on Fedora I don't really care if they make KDE the default.
I know lots of people love KDE but it makes my teeth itch.
Choice is one of the benefits of Linux.

Re:

[Tailhook]

Yes, no hate on Gnome. It's not my cup of tea, but I'm happy if others prefer it. The thing that inspires me, however, is how KDE has prospered, despite huge problems in its past. QT licensing issues back in the day are part of the reason Gnome exists. There was the 4.x debacle. Also, the dominant Linux distros "standardized" on Gnome, or Gnome derivatives.

By all rights KDE should have died long ago. All those issues have since been solved and KDE loyalists have hung in there for years. Now KDE is

Re:

[youngone]

I hadn't thought of that, and you're right. To be fair, a friend of mine uses KDE Neon on his primary laptop, the crazy bastard.

Re:

[nicubunu]

As a former Fedora contributor, I estimate the chance for the distro to switch default desktop to KDE is about 0%, so I can't take the proposal as serious. See, what happens with the default desktop in Fedora is decided by Red Hat desktop team (or whatever is it called now), which is 100% Gnome. RH pays money for Gnome development, while KDE is community only. Also, Gnome is the vehicle which served RH to push their technologies in desktop Linux: SystemD, Wayland and such.

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

I thought gnome was universally hated?

I've met a lot of Linux users over the years and I've never met anyone who loves Gnome, certainly not post 3. The never-customizers tolerate it, everyone else switches. I personally don't get it. It seems to be the one that gets the funding though.

this is cool i think .

I guess... though the sad thing is that it's even a thing to wonder. With NVidia cards, you can get anything from an ancient, crappy, bottom of the range 1050 up to an H100 and all of them work out of the

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Yeah I'm not offended as such, but I am often mystified.

I've never found it very simple, and it lacks so much by the way of tweaks that unless if perfectly fits then tough.

For standard desktop stuff, XFCE is excellent. It's efficient, be straightforward, and customisation is possible but not necessary to get started, and generally very unsurprising in what it does. It's not a trend chaser so every version is just an updated spin on the one before.

I generally use FVWM, which, well you'd likely hate my config

Re:

[caseih]

Doesn't sound like Fedora is for you!

Fedora is, and always has been, a desktop-focused distribution. It's not used in the data center (or shouldn't be!)

There are lots of spins of Fedora. I use the Mate Desktop spin. Just means the default desktop environment is different.

I'm pretty sure you know all that. Well played. We all rose to the bait!

Re: All sounds great butâ¦

[ZERO1ZERO]

Well i dont want to fiddle. I want a rock solid decent environment that uses the defaults and is supported. I dont want to install alternatives. I dont change the environment in win or mac i wouldnt expect to in a Linux distro. The data centre comment is taken from the summary and i thought fedora was a workstation distro hence my question on the pointlessness of celebrating a feature for data centres.

Re:

[caseih]

Well, Linux isn't Mac or Windows, and generally doesn't want to be. There are lots of very good desktops for Linux distributions and Fedora supports most of them which is a tremendously good thing. You don't need a spin of Fedora to get KDE or XFCE or Mate, but it's faster to set up one of these desktop environments with a Fedora spin.

Like I said, probably not for you, but for others these are good things to have. It's nothing at all like having different versions of Windows (Home, Pro, Enterprise), than

Re:

[jon3k]

It's [Fedora] not used in the data center (or shouldn't be!)

I think we should mention there is a Fedora Server [slashdot.org].

Won't let me log in

[kriston]

It won't let me log in. The desktop environment just crashes and sends me back to the login screen.

I'm using Proxmox.

Not Fedora's biggest fan.

[Seven Spirals]

Well, Fedora is the worst Linux distro I've experienced besides GoboLinux (which I have a lot more respect for because it's just an set of experiments). They brought us a long stream of Pottering-ware (the pushed PulseAudio and System==D). They also are upstream of Red Hat which has become a leaning tower of refuse. Anytime there is some kind of nasty non-Unixy contamination in a Linux distro, it usually traces back to Fedora who was wildly excited about it and pushing it hard. The other thing I've noticed

Re:

[vadim_t]

Funny, I like Fedora for pretty much the opposite reasons -- adoption of cool new features like systemd, and nice enterprise features like SELinux that are hard to find with good support almost anywhere else.

Pulseaudio was a very nice improvement over the horrors of getting ALSA configured properly. These days it's replaced with pipewire, by the way.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Well, I am glad you had a good set of experiences that match your values. We are very different people, but it's a big world.

Re:

[vadim_t]

I've grown quite disappointed with the state of Linux over the years.

Back when I started, I had DOS and Windows 3.1/9x. Linux was troublesome (remember writing modelines for X11?), but also like magic in comparison. You want a very minimalist setup? Can do that. Want ridiculously overdone themes with fake transparency on hardware that can barely bear the load? Sure, just install Enlightenment. Want to write complex scripts? Sure, bash is far superior to crappy .bat files, and then there's Perl. And you can

Re: Not Fedora's biggest fan.

[drinkypoo]

Systemd caused me problems I couldn't reasonably troubleshoot without debugging systemd, so I left Ubuntu and derivatives for Devuan, where I am back on sysvinit. Good riddance to that poorly conceived and even more poorly written trash.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

I still have to support folks on system==D distros, but I don't do it with a smile. In the meantime, I'm also using Devuan when I'm not using *BSD boxes.

Re: Not Fedora's biggest fan.

[strawspulled]

You seem to be obsessed with making sure you get a penis into every post.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

What you don't like System====D ? What penis? You seeing penises? :-P

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

First off let me say that I find your tone refreshing. It's nice to have a conversation with someone I don't agree with that doesn't start off with personal attacks.

remember writing modelines for X11?

Indeed. I have a pretty similar background (started with DOS and CP/M too). I also used to fix Trinitron monitors in college. I still have modelines saved for monitors I have from that era. I had to use one for an NEC MultiSync 18" LCD panel just the other day.

Freaking magic, man.

Agreed.

The difference I suspect is that I never got into the "unix philosophy" worship.

Yes, I would say this is definitely a big gulf between us. I definitely did bu

Re:

[vadim_t]

Well, we disagree, there. I see it as having gone through so many iterations and having so many players involved now it's lost much of it's ideological purity and, with that, some of it's power, reliability, and usefulness due to the resulting loss of cohesion. It's backsliding into trying to become Windows NT, completely with 'svchost.exe'.

Ideological purity is to me a flaw, especially if you mean holding on to old things invented in the 60s. Cohesiveness is good, paralysis is not.

Also, as a sysadmin my jo

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Well, I do appreciate your love of regularity of output. I don't think there isn't room for improvement or refinement. In fact, that's one of the things I like about the Unix way, it actually encourages refinement. A lot of what you're observing about Powershell is played out in various scripting languages available on Unix-variants, but I do take your point.

However, I do love me some text including fairly unstructured output (which I am adept at structuring). Once one masters regular expressions, the fle

Re:

[vadim_t]

However, I do love me some text including fairly unstructured output (which I am adept at structuring). Once one masters regular expressions, the flexibility is really unmatched in my experience.

I'm also adept at structuring unstructured output and regular expressions. However, both of those are a waste of my time most of the time, because the only reason why I have to do things is that the structure existed but was discarded and now I have to pointlessly recreate it.

A program had a structured view of the s

Re:

[slack_justyb]

I definitely did buy into the Unix Philosophy. Not so much the ESR version but more the Mike Gancarz slant on it. I see tUP as one of the best things (along with TCP/IP and a host of other pivotal technologies) from Unix. I definitely subscribe to the idea that "Those who do not learn from Unix are doomed to reinvent it (poorly)."

I'll just say that the Unix Philosophy is madding at times. And you mentioned TCP, that's an incredibly good example of where "the UNIX way" never made sense. You've got a single API for the everything is a file thing, but when you dip into sockets you start getting an API that is more specific to those sockets. I mean you can totally use fgets and fread for a socket, but you also get recv, poll, and select because sockets don't neatly follow the everything is a file metaphor.

And TCP was just the start.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

There is a difference between the way any given Unix variant implements something like TCP/IP, and The Unix Philosophy. I agree that many areas are inconsistent and need to be "more Unixy" not only for consistency's sake, but simply because adhering closer to the way other features in the OS are working adds power to the whole (this is one of the strengths of the modularity of pipes). When it comes to the whole "which text is standard" thing, I think it matters less than people pretend. The correct answer i

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

Pulseaudio was a very nice improvement over the horrors of getting ALSA configured properly.

When someone's busy stabbing your leg with a big fork it's nice when they stop and switch to a smaller fork. These days pulse audio mostly just works for me though on some machines, or in some usage patterns I'm not sure which it still needs killing every so often because it craps out. At least with this generation of distros I finally didn't have to build a newer version from source to get around the constant crashi

Re: Not Fedora's biggest fan.

[guruevi]

I never had any issues with Alsa. Most people donâ(TM)t understand what Alsa was and the early tooling didnâ(TM)t help, but Alsa is the API that allows you access to your hardware exclusively, which means only one thing (should) be talking to it. Jack was the (excellent) audio router but many people didnâ(TM)t understand and their hardware not capable of low latency sound they were demanding.

Pulseaudio and now Pipewire is just a router, like Jack, it talks to Alsa. Being written by Poettering

Re:

[vadim_t]

ALSA was complicated. ALSA is a kernel driver + userspace library. Kernel driver just talks to the hardware, and you'll have mixing only if the hardware supports it.

Trouble was that hardware mixing quickly went out of favor. ALSA implemented dmix, which turns out to be library based so it doesn't work for anything that's not talking to ALSA specifically, so old apps are out of luck. There were also troubles with old school apps trying to open /dev/dsp directly and blocking out everything else, ALSA configur

Re:

[guruevi]

But we had Jack back then. The problem with Jack was (and PulseAudio etc) is that it can't do zero-latency routing on a 486. The benefit PulseAudio got was that hardware (overall) got better so inefficiencies were less noticed and people got less picky.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

I also still find ALSA perfectly usable. I also know the difference between ALSA as a set of kernel APIs and sound drivers versus Pulseaudio, Pipewire, Jack, or ESD, which mostly just route audio streams. I also wish others would appreciate the difference. I remember a lot of Pulseaudio bugs and problems over the years (Jack and Pipewire are superior IMO).

Being written by Poettering however it tries to do more than what it is supposed to do and tries to tell the user what to do (Poettering thinks his opinions on systems management in general should apply to the world) leading to endless frustrations from the user.

That's a good summary of the guy in general. I have the same impression.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Anytime someone is excited about Fedora, I'm immediately suspicious and it's almost always justified later on as I learn more about them.

I generalise this far more. See I'm immediately suspicious of people who turn the concept of someone using a distro into some culture war labelling others. Somehow the people who judge others based on a distro they use are all the same gatekeeping arseholes, typically with some anti-systemd thrown in for extra toxicity.

You're like a vegan. How do you know someone hates systemd? They'll tell you, loudly, publicly, angrily, rant about it, then announce to the world that they judged you for daring to not give

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

then announce to the world that they judged you for daring to not give a shit.

For someone who doesn't give a shit you sure sound angry. You mad bro?

Re:

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

Ha ha.. yeah, I'll bite. Systemd is Garbzage. Thanks for pointing that out again.
There is no use case for systemd.

Real system programmers build their own.
The rest? You just take what you are given. And you will like it.

Re:

[gweihir]

Fully agree. Read Hat / Fedora is the worst experience you can get with Linux. No idea how they managed to make it so bad.

Re:

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

more larfs! Red Hat is garbage... I hope I didn't spell that wrong...
Definitely the worst distro. It's IBM.
They drowned Linux in a bathtub.

Re:

[gweihir]

It was already really bad before IBM bought them. You mean it got _worse_?

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Yep. Prices went up. Support went down. Their level of exclusivity for patches and fixes increased and they got more aggressive with their user base. Oh, and I'm sure you saw as they took a swipe at CentOS and tried to tank any dev/test/train boxes by forcing licenses everywhere they possibly could (my old employer, rent seeking IBM).

Re:

[gweihir]

Well, yes. In the end, all that will make people move away from RedHat. Like is currently happening with VmWare. And, come to think of it, Microsoft is trying essentially the same thing with Windows, but more stealthily and slower.

Essentially doing huge damage for a much smaller profit increase. One of the better definitions of "evil".

Re:

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

The free internet party is over. We are all drunk on free services and the music stopped and the lights went on.... now we are all bleary eyed looking around to see who's still left and if it's time to go yet.

What you're saying seems to be the way to do things now, VMware, Microsoft, Red Had... Netfilx... YouTube,... restrictions are going up and funneling people towards pay for service. I've noticed recently lots of newspapers, and pseudo news sites are now raising nags to remove ad blockers, putting a kin

Re:

[jon3k]

The other thing I've noticed is that Fedora fans are usually really stridently clueless but very loud.

Someone should tell Linus Torvalds [reddit.com].

Kde?

[Ubi_NL]

RHEL9 ships without kde, and you have to do a bunch of tricks in EPEL to get it back in. Personally i like kde much more than gnome, so if this is an indication that kde is on its way to RHEL10, then great

Re:

[Junta]

KDE has been in Fedora a while, a lot of Fedora gets dropped on the way to RHEL. Fedora 34 would become RHEL9, and dropped KDE on the way.

I'll wait a bit

[RedMage]

My personal experiences with Fedora have been good over the last 10 years or so, with occasional hiccups. Today I run it mostly in VM's, and 39 has been super stable. I tried the 40 Beta a few weeks ago and felt it wasn't quite ready yet for my use-case, so I'll wait a bit before trying the release, and maybe in-place upgrade a VM that isn't critical. Bleeding edge, like Fedora, sometimes means it can be messy, but I feel they have managed that well in the past releases. I'm sure most of my concern is around the GNOME updates and performance there with VM's, but I didn't try to quantify it due to time and getting-shit-done.