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The Fedora Project released today Fedora Linux 40 as the latest stable version of this popular distribution featuring some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software.
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.
Other Fedora Linux 40 features 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, and the enablement of systemd service hardening features for default system services.
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.
This release also enables easy installation of the PyTorch open-source machine learning framework with the sudo dnf install python3-torch command. However, the current PyTorch release only includes CPU support, as support for accelerators like GPUs and NPUs. will be enabled in future updates.
Under the hood, Fedora Linux 40 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.
Some features have been deprecated or replaced in Fedora Linux 40, such as the libuser library and the passwd package, which will be shipped from shadow-utils instead, the OpenSSL 1.1 and Python 3.7 packages, and the NTLM authentication as a SASL mechanism. This release replaces Zlib with Zlib-ng, minizip with minizip-ng, wget with wget2, and iotop with iotop-c.
Other noteworthy changes include the move of /var/run selinux-policy entries to /run, as well as improved support for unified kernels to enable booting of UKIs directly, enabling UKIs for the AArch64 architecture, and adding 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.
Notable changes in the official Fedora Linux Spins include the latest Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment for the Fedora Cinnamon Spin, OSTree support for the Fedora IoT spin to provide an OS suitable for Edge and IoT use cases, along with Simplified Provisioning, a new tool to deploy and configure Fedora IoT systems.
On top of that, the Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite editions will use bootupd to manage bootloader updates. With this release, the rpm-ostree-based Fedora variants are now featured under a single umbrella called Fedora Atomic Desktops, which consists of Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, and Budgie Atomic.
Once again, the new Fedora Linux release fails to bring the long-awaited Anaconda installer that promises a refreshed user interface and new features when installing Fedora Linux. This has been postponed for the next release planned for later this year, Fedora Linux 41.
Fedora Linux 40 is now available for download from the official website for 64-bit (amd64) and AArch64 (arm64) platforms. Of course, this release is intended for new installations as existing Fedora Linux 39 users can upgrade their installations using DNF system-upgrade. You can also buy a laptop with Fedora Linux 40 pre-installed.
Last updated 2 weeks ago
