Oh, wow. This feels like a big number! I’m proud to announce the 40th release of Fedora Linux, a community-built and community-maintained operating system that belongs to all of us. I’m also happy to note that we’re back on track with an on-time release. Thank you to all Fedora contributors who made that possible, and who have, yet again, made this our best one ever.
This is also a personally exciting number for me, because this marks the 20th release for which I’ve served as Fedora Project Leader. We’ve gone through a lot in this last decade, and I’m incredibly happy to see our community thrive and grow. In addition to many long-familiar names and faces, it’s exciting to see a new generation with new energy and ideas. In some cases, this is literally a new generation, as many of you have grown up with Fedora. But at whatever age, I’m proud we’ve built such a welcoming and friendly community, and that we continue to work at improving our inclusiveness, diversity, and accessibility.
But anyway! Enough of that. Time to see what we’ve got for you in Fedora Linux 40! If you have a system already, Upgrading Fedora to a New Release is easy. If you’re new, or just curious, head to Get Fedora for installation options.
Matthew Miller Matthew is the Fedora Project Leader. You can find him on the Fedora mailing lists or Fedora Chat as "mattdm", or @mattdm@hachyderm.io on Mastodon
Desktop News
Fedora Workstation Edition features the GNOME desktop environment, now updated to version 46. The KDE Spin now includes KDE Plasma 6, and runs with Wayland out of the box.
We’re also officially reviving the “Fedora Atomic Desktop” brand for all of our variants which use ostree or image-based provisioning. Our technology isn’t really “immutable”, so this provides a better grouping. But in short, Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite will remain, while the other desktop variants will become Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
Tools for AI Development
Fedora Linux 40 ships with our first-ever PyTorch package. PyTorch is a popular framework for deep learning, and it can be difficult to reliably install with the right versions of drivers and libraries and so on. The current package only supports running on the CPU, without GPU or NPU acceleration, but this is just the first step. Our aim is to produce a complete stack with PyTorch and other popular tools ready to use on a wide variety of hardware out-of-the-box.
We’re also shipping with ROCm 6 — open-source software that provides acceleration support for AMD graphics cards. We plan to have that enabled for PyTorch in a future release.
Updates all around
As usual, we’ve rebuilt everything in the distribution using updated compilers and libraries (and, of course, those updated tools are ready for developers to use). These updates bring bugfixes, security improvements, and performance gains.
And, of course, hundreds of Fedora packagers and testers have worked to integrate the latest versions of open source software from thousands of upstream projects. Those projects, in turn, are made by an uncountable number of developers and contributors working on marketing, design, documentation, code, quality, translations, communications, events, governance, infrastructure, security, and so much more. Thank you again to everyone who makes Fedora amazing, and to everyone whose work has built this whole universe of free and open source software.
