The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the availability of Fedora Linux 41 Beta. While we’ll have more to share with the general availability of Fedora Linux 41 in about a month, there is plenty in the beta to get excited about now.
Some changes of note
Valkey replaces Redis As Redis recently changed to a proprietary license, we have replaced Redis with Valkey. All software shipped by Fedora is open source and free software, in line with our Freedom foundation. If you are currently using Redis, see How to move from Redis to Valkey for migration help.
Goodbye, Python 2! Starting with Fedora Linux 41, there will be no Python 2 in Fedora, other than PyPy. Packages requiring Python 2.7 at runtime will need to upgrade to a new version, or be retired also. Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2, or users of software that cannot be updated, can use containers with older Fedora releases.
Proprietary Nvidia driver installation with Secure Boot support Although it can’t be part of Fedora Linux, we know that the Nvidia binary driver is pragmatically essential for many people. Previously, Nvidia driver installation had been removed from GNOME Software because it didn’t support Secure Boot, which is increasingly-often enabled by default on laptops. This change brings the option back for Fedora Workstation users with Secure Boot supported. This is good news for folks who want to use Fedora Linux for gaming and CUDA. The change also helps Fedora stay relevant for AI/LLVM workloads.
DNF 5 is here In Fedora Linux 41, the dnf package management command will be updated to version 5. (DNF5 and bootc will be available on image-based Fedora variants such as Atomic desktops and Fedora IoT.) The new packages will make it simpler to build and update bootable container images based on these variants.
DNF and bootc in Image Mode Fedora Variants In Fedora Linux 41, the DNF package manager will be updated to version 5. This release is faster, smaller, and better. (Pick all three!) You won’t need to change habits — the command is still just dnf, and the basic syntax isn’t different. As one might expect with a major version, there are some incompatible changes. See the DNF 5 documentation for details.
RPM 4.20 Under the hood, our lower-level package management tool is RPM, which also gets a new release, bringing new features for Fedora development. Users won’t see a direct impact immediately, but this update will help us make the distro better overall over time.
Reproducible-builds progress A post-build cleanup is integrated into the RPM build process, making most Fedora packages now reproducible. That is, you can re-build a package from source and expect the package contents to be exactly identical. If this is interesting to you, check out Fedora Reproducible Builds for more.
New fedora-repoquery tool Fedora-repoquery is a small command line tool for doing repoqueries of Fedora, EPEL, eln, and Centos Stream package repositories. It wraps dnf repoquery separating the cached repo data under separate repo names for faster cached querying. Repoqueries are frequently used by Fedora developers and users, so a more powerful tool like this is generally useful.
KDE Plasma Mobile Spin KDE Plasma Mobile brings the KDE Plasma Desktop to a flexible, mobile format in Fedora 41 as a Spin. This promises to work on both phones, tablets and 2-in-1 laptops.
LXQt 2.0 LXQt in Fedora will be upgraded to v2.0, which notably ports the whole desktop to Qt 6 and adds experimental Wayland support.
Matthew Miller
Matthew is the Fedora Project Leader. You can find him on the Fedora mailing lists or Fedora Chat as "mattdm", or [url]@[email protected][/url] on Mastodon
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.
