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Today we are celebrating and the reason is the official release of the new version of Fedora 40, which arrives in a timely manner, since in various previous releases portraits were presented due to detected problems and I personally thought that Fedora 40 would not be the exception, since with the recent XZ library issue, Canonical did delay its releases.
But well, leaving this aside and continuing with the celebration, Fedora 40 features a large number of important changes and improvements, which range from improvements in tools, package management, as well as changes in the new custom Atomic Desktops distributions, among other things.
What's new in Fedora 40?
In this new version of Fedora 40 that is presented in the desktop edition The new version of was implemented GNOME 46 which brought with it a global search function, allowing users to search the entire system directly from the desktop. Besides, Improved performance of file manager and terminal emulators, experimental support for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) was added and output quality for fractional scaling was also improved, thus improving display on high-resolution displays. Other notable improvements includen extended capabilities to connect to external services, updates to the system configurator and improvements to the notification system and that GTK uses a new rendering engine based on the Vulkan API.
In the desktop edition with KDE was updated to version KDE 6, using the Wayland protocol instead of X11, this transition involved discontinuing support for X11-based sessions, due to consideration of the X.Org server being deprecated in RHEL 9 and its planned removal in future releases. This change was facilitated by the transition of fbdev drivers to simpledrm drivers, which integrate better with Wayland, and by Wayland support in NVIDIA's proprietary drivers.
On the part of thes custom distributions, Fedora consolidated its variants under the Atomic Desktops brand, this includes GNOME-based Fedora Silverblue, KDE-based Fedora Kinoite, Fedora CoreOS, and Fedora IoT. Likewise, new versions of Fedora Sericea and Fedora Onyx are now distributed under the names Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.
In addition to this, it is noted that the second phase of the transition to the modernized loading process has been completed, which minimizes the differences with classic boot by adopting a unified kernel image called UKI. In this second phase, the ability to load UKI directly from the UEFI shim.efi module, dispensing with a separate bootloader such as grub or sd-boot, support for using UKI on systems with Aarch64 architecture has been implemented, and a version of the UKI image specifically designed for cloud environments and protected virtual machines has been prepared.
Another change that stands out in Fedora 40 is that A ready-to-use package with the PyTorch machine learning framework has been added to the repository. This package currently supports running on CPUs without GPU or NPU acceleration, but support for GPU and NPU accelerators is planned to be added in future releases.
They have also been implemented improvements to NetworkManager, Well, in Fedora 40, a mechanism to detect IPv4 address conflicts on the local network is now enabled by default, and a permanent MAC address for wireless connections has also been enabled.
Build tools like Mock, Koji and Copr now use the DNF 5 package manager to install build dependencies, plus loading metadata with lists of files included in packages is now disabled in DNF by default.
In Fedora 40, the package with the OpenSSL 1.1 library was removed due to the end of its support, and related dependencies have been changed to Open SSL 3.0. Additionally, the Zlib library has been replaced with a fork called Zlib-ng, which provides additional optimizations to improve performance while maintaining API-level compatibility with zlib.
Finally, deprecated the libuser library and removed the libuser-based passwd package, replacing it with a utility from the shadow-utils package. Additionally, changes are in the works to GCC to include a newer version of the C language standard by default, which will impact some features of the legacy language.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The generation of delta updates of RPM packages has been stopped, which means that only data modified relative to the previously installed version of the package is loaded during updates. Deltarpm support was also disabled in DNF and DNF5.
- Introduced Passim, a caching server designed to distribute frequently requested files across the local network without directly accessing primary servers or resorting to global CDNs.
- Image Builder is now used to generate Fedora Workstation Live images and osbuild for minimal images on ARM architecture.
- Kiwi replaced ImageFactory to produce Fedora Cloud Edition images.
- Kubernetes-related packages have been restructured and Fedora IoT now uses boot containers built with OSTree and bootc.
If you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details in the following link.
Download Fedora 40
For those interested in downloading this new version of Fedora 40 to install or test on their computers, you can obtain the system image with Gnome or its different variants (Spins) from the distribution's official website. The link is this.