The Fedora Linux distribution had another great year with the successful releases of Fedora 40 and Fedora 41 that were both rather polished and largely on-time — something that couldn’t be said frequently of Fedora releases long ago. Fedora Linux has continued pushing leading edge innovations into their distribution thanks to the sponsorship and upstream contributions of Red Hat engineers. 2024 was a rather successful year for this high grade Linux distribution.
As we approach the end of 2024, for those wanting to re-live some of the finest moments of Fedora for the year, here is a look back at the most popular Fedora news articles on Phoronix over the course of the calendar year.
It will be interesting to see what more comes of Fedora in 2025 — be sure to share your thoughts/hopes by commenting on this article within the forums.
Fedora 41 Looks To Offer A KDE Plasma Mobile Spin
Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn’s Fedora 41 release.
Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora’s Mirrors
A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora’s package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora’s mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon’s cloud.
Fedora 42 Change Proposal Wants To Make KDE Plasma The Default Over GNOME
A change proposal filed for fedora 42 seeks to make KDE Plasma the default desktop of Fedora Workstation while GNOME would move to its own separate spin/edition. The proposal has yet to be voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but given Red Hat’s deep roots with GNOME, I have a hard time seeing this pass at least in the near-term.
Fedora Linux 40 Cleared For Release Next Week
After not being ready in time for this week’s early release target date, it’s now been determined today that Fedora 40 is ready for release next week.
Fedora Workstation 41 To No Longer Install GNOME X.Org Session By Default
Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME’s Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default.
New Features Approved For Fedora 40, Renewed Debate Over Dropping KDE X11 Support
This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on some new features coming for Fedora 40 this April.
Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Being Considered
System76 has been developing the Rust-based COSMIC desktop for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution but its usage won’t be artificially limited to that in-house distro. Among other distributions that have been looking toward packaging it, interest is currently being evaluated in creating a Fedora special interest group (SIG) for the COSMIC desktop environment.
Fedora KDE Desktop Spin Promoted To Same Tier As GNOME-Based Fedora Workstation
Earlier this year was a Fedora change proposal seeking to make KDE Plasma the default over GNOME for Fedora 42. A compromise of sorts has now been settled on with the Fedora Desktop Spin being promoted to an “Edition” status that will put it on the same level as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation Edition.
Fedora 41 Looks To “-O3” Optimizations For Its Python Build
A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the “-O3” compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora’s imposed default of the “-O2” optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.
Fedora Linux 40 Available For Download As A Wonderful Upgrade
It’s Fedora 40 release day! Fedora 40 is now available for download from mirrors for this leading Linux distribution.
Fedora 41 Hopes The GIMP 3.0 Photoshop Alternative Will Be Ready To Shine
Fedora developers are hoping that the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 will ship before October and be all ready for serving as the default GIMP package with the in-development Fedora 41.
Fedora 41 To Replace Power-Profiles-Daemon With “Tuned”
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to “Tuned” as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins.
Many New Features Approved This Week For Fedora 40
This week the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) signed off on a large number of change proposals for the Fedora 40 release due out in April.
Fedora Linux 40 Beta Cleared For Release Next Week
After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week.
Fedora 40 Looks To Ship AMD ROCm 6 For End-To-End Open-Source GPU Acceleration
Fedora 40 is looking at shipping the AMD ROCm 6.x GPU compute stack to offer “end-to-end open-source GPU acceleration” with ease for this Red Hat funded Linux distribution.
Fedora Will End Up Supporting The NVIDIA Driver With Secure Boot
Installing the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver stack on Fedora currently doesn’t jive with UEFI Secure Boot systems and can lead to the OS being unbootable. As such, the NVIDIA driver option was previously removed from GNOME Software. But as the NVIDIA driver is still widely sought after on Fedora by Linux gamers and those wanting to run CUDA/AI workloads especially, Fedora 41 is now cleared to roll-out NVIDIA driver support with UEFI Secure Boot integration.
Fedora 42 On 64-bit ARM Might Make It Seamless To Run x86/x86_64 Programs
As one of the early feature proposals for Fedora 42, there is a proposal being considered to make for a nice out-of-the-box experience running x86/x86_64 game/application binaries atop Fedora 42 AArch64 hosts.
Fedora 41 Looks To Finally Say Goodbye To Python 2.7
A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.
Fedora 41 Releases Today With Many Shiny New Features
Fedora 41 is ready for release today as a wonderful update to this leading edge Linux distribution.
Fedora 40 Beta Released With GNOME 46 & KDE Plasma 6.0 On Wayland Desktops
The beta release of Fedora 40 is now available for testing ahead of the planned official release next month.