Fedora 42

Versie 42 van de Linux-distributie Fedora is uitgekomen. Fedora is de niet-commerciële opvolger van Red Hat Linux, dat zich sinds 2003 als Red Hat Enterprise Linux op de zakelijke markt richt. Fedora wordt standaard met de Gnome-desktopomgeving geleverd, maar er zijn ook versies met bijvoorbeeld MATE, Cinnamon, KDE en Xfce beschikbaar. Het besturingssysteem is beschikbaar in de vijf smaken, namelijk Workstation, Server, IoT, Cloud en CoreOS. De releasenotes voor versie 42 kunnen hieronder worden gevonden.

What’s new?

We’ve promoted our KDE Plasma Desktop offering to “Edition” status. The Fedora KDE team has been hard at work making sure bugs get fixed and everything is polished just so. We’re confident that this can stand along our other amazing flagship offerings. I know the naming is a bit confusing, with GNOME-powered “Workstation” using a generic label while KDE Plasma Desktop has the tech right in the name. We’ll get that figured out eventually. If you don’t know where to start, don’t panic. Pick one and see how it goes. They’re both excellent desktop environments with great upstream communities, and the same Fedora system underneath it all.

We also have a new alternative desktop choice: COSMIC. This is a modern, written-all-in-Rust desktop environment from our friends over at System76. Perhaps most excitingly, we have a new installation interface! The previous UI was designed to manage a lot of before-you-even-start configuration choices. Over the past decade, though, we’ve gone to “get the full system installed with no fuss, then set up what you need from a complete environment”. That made the “hub and spoke” model more confusing than helpful. The new UI is streamlined and sleek, just like the Heart of Gold.

Of course, there are other big changes, as well as the usual updates to thousands of packages. See the Fedora Linux 42 Release Notes for all of the details, and don’t miss the “What’s New?” posts here on Fedora Magazine.

Last minute warning!

No, it’s not the Vogons, but it is ugly. We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last minute, and since the release was already out of the airlock, we can’t do much about it. It doesn’t damage anything, but is annoying: just booting the Live media adds an unexpected entry to the UEFI boot loader even when Fedora Linux 42 is not installed to the local system.

This is primarily a concern when you are dual-booting with a different operating system, or if you’re just running the Live image and not intending to actually install. The problem is mostly harmless cosmetic, but still, we should have caught it sooner. Apparently this was posted in our local planning office, but we didn’t go down to the basement past the “Beware of the Leopard” sign to find it.

You can read more about this in the Common Bugs entry for this issue, including how to remove the unwanted entry (and how to avoid the problem altogether).