Fedora 42 is out today as a fabulous update to this prominent leading-edge Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat. I’ve been running Fedora 42 on several systems already — including upgrading my main production system to it — and it’s been working out very well. Fedora 42 is packed full of new features and software updates making it a great H1’2025 Linux operating system release.
Fedora Workstation 42 ships the GNOME 48 desktop with HDR display support, Wayland improvements, and many other refinements. Fedora Workstation 42 is also now using its new web UI based Anaconda installer interface.
Fedora 42 also brings better Intel SGX support, Linux DRM Panic screen integration, the first Fedora COSMIC Spin release, SDL3 transition support, and much more.
Fedora 42 is also shipping the nearly-final GCC 15 compiler along with Golang 1.24, the LLVM 20 toolchain, PHP 8.4, Ruby 3.4, and a ton of other software upgrades. If GNOME isn’t your thing, KDE Plasma 6.3 is available along with the Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1 desktops. The Fedora Wiki outlines all the interesting Fedora 42 changes in full.
I’ve been running Fedora 42 even on my main production system for a few days already and very happy with the quality of this release. On test systems from laptops to servers it’s also been very pleasant. Frankly the only critique I have of it so far in my usage is the default background… It looks like something out of a children’s book or some cartoon film. Typically I don’t care about desktop backgrounds much and 99% of the time just use the default background and am content with it, but with Fedora Workstation 42 I personally find it too funky/off-putting that I bothered to change it to one of the Fedora wallpaper alternative. Yes, very minor but really don’t see how a cartoonish background of a forest ties into Fedora or its branding even compared to some of the backgrounds on prior Fedora Linux releases. So besides wishing it had a simpler/sleeker/more-professional looking default, I really haven’t encountered any other real complaints with Fedora 42 thus far — so all in all, Fedora 42 is looking to be a splendid success.
Those wanting to download Fedora 42 can go ahead and begin downloading it from Fedora mirrors. I’ll have more Fedora 42 performance benchmarks and other Linux distribution performance comparisons for 2025 coming up soon on Phoronix.
