Fedora Linux 42 promotes KDE edition to major release alongside Gnome

Contents

Despite many small updates to the desktops, Fedora Linux was released without its almost traditional delay. In addition to the usual main release with Gnome, now available in version 48, the Fedora team has also promoted the previously sidelined release with KDE Plasma 6.3 to a main release following an internal vote. In practical terms, this means more resources for the development of the KDE distribution and broader support for processor architectures. Fedora Linux with KDE Plasma is now also available for IBM Power8 and OpenPOWER systems (ppc64le). Bugs in KDE may now also delay a Fedora release date, should this be necessary in the future, as is the case for the Gnome edition.

KDE comeback in Gnome territory

The upgrading of the KDE desktop recently received the support of half a dozen illustrious Fedora developers and was already brought up during the last Fedora conference Flock 2024. A vote on this five months ago was in favor of the KDE supporters, who argued that many creative tools such as Kdenlive, Krita and OBS Studio integrate better with KDE as Qt programs, which also gained in importance for gamers with VRR under Wayland and DRM Leasing.

Nevertheless, Fedora Linux's move towards KDE is surprising, as it has always been a flagship for the Gnome desktop, which is largely financed by Fedora's main sponsor Red Hat. In addition, things did not look good for the Fedora KDE spin ten years ago when its long-time maintainer threw in the towel in 2015 due to the fragmented KDE libraries and their division into the Frameworks, Plasma desktop and Gear (formerly Applications) components. Due to the high effort involved, Red Hat also showed no interest in KDE by 2018 at the latest. Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, KDE is no longer available in the standard sources. There is now a good chance that KDE Plasma will make a comeback in CentOS Stream and later also in RHEL.

Only for Gnome: New installer

For the time being, however, only the workstation edition with Gnome 48 has received another remarkable innovation: Fedora 42 presents a new, HTML-based interface under Gnome in the live system for the Anaconda installation program, the Web UI, which, in the style of Calamares, structures the system setup steps on the data carrier in a linear and clearer way. WebUI has been in the test phase since Fedora 38. Partitioning is now much simpler and allows the use of an entire disk with a single click without the previously necessary trips to submenus to delete existing partitions.

The installation is completed in just a few steps, although Gnome only asks for the desired user name, password, optional root account and host name after the first start. Because this second Fedora installation step has so far only been implemented in Gnome, the other editions are still using Anaconda with the previous GTK frontend, which is now fully ready for Wayland.

Spins and variants: Fedora with Cosmic

There is a new addition to the "spins", i.e. the alternative Fedora variants with other user interfaces, in the form of Cosmic. Cosmic is an in-house development by System76 for their Linux distribution Pop!_OS. Unlike the previous Pop!_OS desktop, Cosmic is no longer based on Gnome, but has been rewritten from scratch in Rust. This slim, attractive desktop environment is still in a late alpha phase, but already shows an appealing performance, even on modest hardware, and a responsiveness that is reminiscent of the always experimental desktop Enlightenment.

The XFCE edition of Fedora makes the leap to version 4.20 of this lean working environment, which was released last December. The LXQt desktop, which like KDE uses the Qt toolkit, is also making a big step up to version 2.1 in Fedora, which now supports Wayland sessions and various Wayland compositors. With the KWin compositor borrowed from KDE, LXQt can now offer almost complete Wayland support and is sprinting ahead of the other lightweight Linux desktops.

Fedora 42 offers a total of thirteen different desktops thanks to the two main editions and numerous spins. There are also various image-based variants (known as Immutable or Atomic) such as Silverblue, which are based on OSTtree and no longer rely on RPM packages. Specialized live systems such as the Fedora 42 Security spin are also available in the download directory. Some of these Fedora versions are not only available for the Intel platform (x86_64), but also for ARM 64 bit (aarch64).

All editions share the Linux kernel 6.14, although there will probably be an update to kernel 6.15 at a later date. To support current graphics cards, the Mesa 3D library has just received an important update to version 25, which was released at the end of February this year. At the time of publication, the release notes for Fedora Linux 42 were still sparse, but the list of all the changes implemented by the Fedora developers provides detailed information on many other details in this version.

(dahe)