Don't panic: Fedora 42 is here

Fedora Linux 42 has been released with many incremental improvements and updates. In this development cycle, the KDE Plasma Desktop has finally gotten a promotion from a spin to an edition, the new web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer makes its debut, and the Wayland-ification of Fedora continues apace. In all it is a solid release with lots of polish.

The ultimate answer

The Fedora Project has, as a one-time exception, resurrected its tradition of release names. Fedora 42 is named "Adams" to honor Douglas Adams, the creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, who passed away far too soon in 2001. Prior to this, the last Fedora release to have a release name was Fedora 20, which was called Heisenbug; the use of release names was discontinued by the Fedora Board in October 2013. The Fedora Board itself was replaced by the Fedora Council in November 2014.

As many LWN readers no doubt already know, 42 is, in the story, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. In addition to the name, the default wallpaper for the release also has a little Easter egg from the series that some have found puzzling.

Installer changes

Fedora Workstation users who do a fresh installation of 42 will get a chance to try out the Anaconda web-based installer. (Other editions and spins still offer the "classic" Anaconda experience.) Web-based installers seem to be all the rage these days: the openSUSE project is taking a similar approach with its Agama installer.

In addition to replacing the technology used under the hood for the user interface, which is now based on the Cockpit framework rather than GTK, Anaconda drops the "hub and spoke" model in favor of a wizard-based installation approach. The rationale for this, according to the change proposal, is that the traditional installer presents "too much information at once" and is harder to use if the user does not know what they need. It's hard for me to say, objectively, whether that's true or not—especially since I've been using the old-style Anaconda installer workflow for many years and have performed hundreds of installs with it. Good, bad, or indifferent, the new installer is going to take some getting used to.

However, in presenting less information, the new installer does make it harder to find custom partitioning. The installer has four main steps: choosing the language and keyboard layout, installation method, storage configuration, and confirming the choices before starting the installation. One might expect that "storage configuration" would be the step to modify partitions, etc. However, that step is only for users to choose whether or not they want to encrypt disks. To modify partitions, users need to select "Launch storage editor" from the three-dot menu (known as a kebab menu) in the right-hand corner of the installer while in step two. Before being taken to the storage editor, users are presented with a warning dialog and advised that the editor is "an advanced utility and not intended to be used in a typical installation".

Presumably, a "typical installation" is one in which Fedora is installed on a system with a single disk that it gets to own entirely. That is probably the most common scenario, but many users have more advanced needs. For example, users might want to dual-boot Fedora with Windows, or to use more than one disk (e.g., putting /home on a separate disk). This change does users something of a disservice. Instead of making complicated things easier to do, it seems to try to dissuade users from doing them instead.

That said, users who don't want to step off the path paved by the new installer should find it to be simple and unintimidating. I ran through the installation a few times in virtual machines, trying different options, and it worked flawlessly.

KDE edition

KDE is finally being presented on equal footing with GNOME as a Fedora edition, but what does that mean for those who have used the KDE spin all along? Not very much, really. The change is, as the proposal notes, "mainly a marketing change". It means that KDE will, eventually, show up on the front page of the Fedora site alongside Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, Fedora IoT, Fedora Cloud, and Fedora CoreOS.

This is not to say that there are no goodies in store for KDE users in this release. Fedora 42 updates KDE Plasma to the 6.3 series, which has some minor improvements over the version in Fedora 41, Plasma 6.2.

The KDE edition still uses the classic Anaconda installer, so users doing a fresh install will not notice any differences from previous installs. After the installation, KDE pops up the Welcome Center dialog that provides a short overview of KDE's features and asks the user to share anonymous usage information. Data sharing is off by default, so if one speeds through the Welcome Center without paying close attention (as many users are no doubt likely to do if they have used KDE previously), they will not inadvertently give up their usage data. Users are also asked if they would like to enable third-party package repositories.

KDE 6.3 offers better fractional scaling, following work to overhaul how KWin places content on the screen's pixel grid. I had a chance to tinker with scaling shortly after installing the Fedora KDE edition on a test system, when I couldn't shake the feeling that things weren't quite right. Specifically, I had the impression that the interface had been set up by someone with an affinity for large-print books. My first thought was that KDE had not detected my monitor's resolution properly. Instead, I found that the display resolution was correct, but KDE had defaulted to 115% scale.

KDE allows the user to set fractional scaling to a value between 50% and 300%, so I spent some time trying different values to see what worked best. Anything below 75% resulted in text too small and fuzzy for my taste, but perhaps there are users who have the right combination of hardware and eyesight to find that 50% is usable. Likewise, scaling at 150% or 200% is usable on a 13-inch Framework laptop display, with its oddball 2256x1504 resolution, but 300% is too much of a good thing. In contrast, GNOME also supports fractional scaling—but only for values of 100% or above and in 25% increments. That is, one can set GNOME to 100%, 125%, 150%, and so forth, but not 115%. KDE supports smaller increments, so users can try 80% if 75% isn't quite right, or 120% rather than 125%, and so on. Ultimately, likely to the disappointment of the KDE developers who have been working hard on fractional scaling, I set it at 100%.

KDE e.V. has a process for selecting goals to focus on every three years. Last year, it announced several goals to take it through 2026—one of which is to improve support for input devices. 6.3 delivers on this with improvements for users with drawing tablets and touchpads. Sadly, I do not have the appropriate hardware to test KDE's improvements for configuring drawing tablets (see this site for a rundown), but I was pleased to see that KDE developers have added the ability to switch off the touchpad if a laptop has a mouse plugged in. This is one of those small changes that offers a major quality-of-life improvement.

One change that may make a small number of users very happy: the full set of KDE packages are now available for the Power architecture (ppc64le), and there are installable live images for the OpenPOWER-based systems.

KDE Gear, the collection of standard KDE applications such as the Dolphin file manager, Okular document viewer, and Kdenlive video editor, has a different release schedule than Plasma. While KDE's desktop is updated twice a year, Gear's feature releases are on a quarterly cycle. Fedora's KDE special interest group (SIG) generally maintains Gear applications in a rolling-release fashion across supported Fedora releases. For example, Okular, Dolphin, and Kdenlive packages for Fedora 40, 41, and 42 are all from the 24.12 feature release of KDE Gear. (Specifically, Gear version 24.12.3 released on March 6.)

There are a few interesting new features in 24.12, such as improved keyboard navigation in Dolphin, but it is mostly polish. That extends to the overall KDE experience in Fedora 42—a number of small enhancements and polish, but nothing that is likely to have a great impact on day-to-day use. That goes both ways, of course: there are no changes I noticed in 42 that detract from the KDE experience.

Wayland-ification continues

The slow deprecation of X11 throughout Fedora continues in this release. Last year, the KDE SIG dropped support for X11 with the move to Plasma 6. Kevin Kofler stepped up to maintain the required packages to allow users to install X11 support post-installation, after some requisite drama and intervention by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo).

This release takes a few more steps toward chiseling X11 out of Fedora. The first change is Anaconda shipping as a native Wayland application and dropping X11 packages from the installation images when possible. Spins that still depend on X11, such as LXDE and Xfce, include the X11 packages for now.

Beware of leopard

The GNOME Display Manager (GDM) has, somewhat stealthily, dropped support for X11 sessions in Fedora 42 as well. Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski raised an objection to this on the fedora-devel mailing list on April 9. He noted that there was nothing in the change list about it, and suggested that it be reverted for this release and moved to Fedora 43. Kevin Fenzi said that it could have been noted as a change to raise awareness, but noted that GNOME upstream plans to remove X11 support in the next cycle–and that the change itself was made in Rawhide in September 2024. Re-adding X11 support would only be useful for trying to run X11 GNOME sessions, which, he suspects, will be increasingly difficult.

Michael Catanzaro said that it does seem "a little petty" for Fedora to disable X11 support in GDM before upstream GNOME disables it. But if the project is confident X11 support will be removed in upstream, "then it seems reasonable to do this in Fedora first". He added that he did not have a strong opinion but observed that it was "long past time for you to figure out a path forward" for those still using GNOME on X11.

GNOME and Fedora Workstation both switched to Wayland by default in 2016; it's been 9 years now, a *really* long time to not be ready for this.

The removal was proposed as a blocker bug, which would have delayed the Fedora 42 release and required restoration of X11 support, but it was voted down.

Something for everybody

All Fedora editions and spins share the same base set of packages, meaning that each version has the same kernel, libraries, and utilities. Fedora 42 brings Linux 6.14.0, and the usual GNU toolchain updates—GNU C Library (glibc) 2.41, Binutils 2.44, and the GNU Debugger (gdb) 16.2. Python has been updated to 3.13.3. The Python 3.8 package, which was available in earlier Fedora releases for compatibility with other Linux distributions, has been retired. Go 1.24.2, LLVM 20, OpenJDK 21.0.6, Perl 5.40.1, PHP 8.4.6, Ruby 3.4.2, Rust 1.86.0, and Tcl/Tk 9.0 are also available.

One under-the-hood change in this release worth noting is the unification of /usr/bin and /usr/sbin. This may go entirely unnoticed by many Fedora users but required a fair amount of work on behalf of Fedora contributors. The primary benefits of the change are to simplify packaging—developers don't have to consider whether things should be installed in bin or sbin—and to make Fedora more compatible with other Linux distributions by using the same paths for utilities like ip, nstat, and ping. This change follows the /usr move that was finalized in Fedora 17.

Packages that require the git binary, but not everything that comes with Git, can now depend on the git-core package. As described in the switch to git-core change proposal, the git-core package only has nine packages as dependencies and consumes 8MB on install media or 32MB when installed. The git package requires 76 packages as dependencies (including a slew of Perl modules) and takes up 19MB on install media or 75MB when installed.

Even though KDE has graduated to edition status, the number of Fedora spins remains the same. The project has added a new spin, Fedora COSMIC, which is based on the alpha 6 release. LWN covered COSMIC in August 2024.

Microsoft has offered the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 on Windows 10 and Windows 11 to run Linux in a virtual machine with some integration into the desktop. One of the changes in Fedora 42 was to start producing Fedora WSL images that Windows folks can install so they have Fedora as an option. Currently, Fedora images are not available in the Windows Store, so users need to grab an image and install it manually. Images are available for x86_64 and Arm (aarch64) and instructions are on the wiki.

With Adams out the door, Fedora developers can now turn their full attention to Fedora 43, which is due in October. Some of the changes proposed for 43, so far include 99% package reproducibility, moving to RPM 6.0, and disabling support for building OpenSSL engines. Naturally, 43 will also have the usual flurry of software updates as well.

Fedora 42 is almost certainly not the answer to the ultimate question, but it is a solid update with quite a few minor improvements. Users on Fedora 41 won't see a drastic change, but that is not a bad thing—it's a stable release that keeps users up to date with the most recent open-source applications without too many sharp edges.