Fedora 43 Beta is releasing today as we work toward the official release in either late October or early November. I have been testing out the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta candidate to great success on the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” powered Framework Desktop. Here are some benchmarks of Fedora Workstation 42 compared to the Fedora Workstation 43 Beta.
Fedora Workstation 43 Beta is riding on the GNOME 49 desktop, powered by the Linux 6.17 development kernel, Mesa 25.1.4 graphics drivers are currently in use, and Btrfs continues to be leveraged by Fedora Workstation. It’s been a smooth experience running the Fedora 43 Beta the past few days on the Framework Desktop.
The Framework Desktop as tested was with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics, 128GB of RAM, and 2TB WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD.
For some benchmarking of the current state of Fedora Workstation 43 I compared it to Fedora Workstation 42 on the same desktop. Fedora Workstation 42 was tested out-of-the-box and then running all available package upgrades. With Fedora shipping new Linux kernel releases, major new Mesa 3D driver releases, and other more prominent package updates than Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, the upgrades are much more meaningful. Upgrading Fedora 42 currently means going from Linux 6.14 to Linux 6.16, Mesa 25.0 to Mesa 25.1, and other notable updates.
Both Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 were running well with the Framework Desktop with even the out-of-the-fox Fedora 42 state being nice for this high-end AMD Zen 5 + RDNA3.5 SoC. Let’s see how Fedora Workstation 43 Beta is performing on this AMD Ryzen AI Max desktop.