What’s new?
We’ve promoted our KDE Plasma Desktop offering to “Edition” status. The Fedora KDE team has been hard at work making sure bugs get fixed and everything is polished just so. We’re confident that this can stand along our other amazing flagship offerings.
I know the naming is a bit confusing, with GNOME-powered “Workstation” using a generic label while KDE Plasma Desktop has the tech right in the name. We’ll get that figured out eventually. If you don’t know where to start, don’t panic. Pick one and see how it goes. They’re both excellent desktop environments with great upstream communities, and the same Fedora system underneath it all.
We also have a new alternative desktop choice: COSMIC. This is a modern, written-all-in-Rust desktop environment from our friends over at System 76.
Perhaps most excitingly, we have a new installation interface! The previous UI was designed to manage a lot of before-you-even-start configuration choices. Over the past decade, though, we’ve gone to “get the full system installed with no fuss, then set up what you need from a complete environment”. That made the “hub and spoke” model more confusing than helpful. The new UI is streamlined and sleek, just like the Heart of Gold.
Of course, there are other big changes, as well as the usual updates to thousands of packages. See the Fedora Linux 42 Release Notes for all of the details, and don’t miss the “What’s New?” posts here on Fedora Magazine.