Announcing Fedora Linux 40

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce that the latest version of the Fedora Linux operating system, Fedora Linux 40,  is now generally available. For desktop systems, this release brings GNOME 46 and KDE Plasma 6 (with the Wayland graphics stack). It also features newly-integrated AI tooling, and updates to many software packages from the whole open source ecosystem. Don’t forget to ensure your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release.

CentOS Stream 10 & RHEL 10 branch point

Fedora Linux 40 comes full of new features and changes. However, this Fedora Linux release is also notable as the branch point for CentOS Stream 10. CentOS Stream is the next major release of the rolling-release CentOS Stream distribution, which in turn becomes the foundation for the next major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL 10. This means that the last few years of upstream innovation in Fedora will begin working their way downstream with the enterprise guarantee that RHEL is known for.

Introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops

Fedora Linux 40 returns a classic brand to its users, with a new twist: introducing Fedora Atomic Desktops! All rpm-ostree based variants of Fedora, including Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway and Budgie, will be grouped under the Fedora Atomic Desktops brand. The Sericea operating system is now known as Fedora Atomic Sway.

Bootable IoT containers

In Fedora Linux 40, you can now try out bootable IoT containers, a new way to build and deliver OS-tree content through cloud-native patterns.

AI advancements

Fedora Linux 40 now has two newly-integrated AI packages. PyTorch and ROCm 6 are now available in the latest release, allowing users to utilize a high demand machine learning framework that is widely used for image and speech recognition, natural language processing and other AI applications.

PyTorch provides a user-friendly interface for building and testing complex machine learning models. The current build enables CPU-based computation as a first step to making this important tool easier to access. Accelerator support is planned for future releases. ROCm 6 enables the newest flagship datacenter GPU, the AMD Instinct MI300, as well as previously enabled GPUs.

Porting to modern C

This release of Fedora includes a transition from an older C compiler to a more modern C stack. Programmers who use Fedora Linux 40 will have the benefit of clearer build fail error messages.

Individual, stable MAC address assignment for Wi-Fi

A new feature in F40 is the ability to assign a random but stable MAC address to a user's Wi-Fi connection, making it difficult for advertisers and network operators to track and gather data so our users can continue to experience stable, reliable connections to Wi-Fi without compromising their privacy.

Cloud Edition images now built with Kiwi

The Fedora Cloud Edition has moved its image generation tooling to use Kiwi. This brings Fedora and the Kiwi project closer together, forging a great working relationship between our Cloud working group and the upstream maintainers. In addition, using Kiwi to generate the cloud images will allow Fedora images to be built on many different platforms and distributions without needing to modify the runners, users can add their own defined script to the image generation and it supports multiple build types such as ISOs, raw disks and containers. Image building has never been more diverse and accessible as it is in Fedora Linux 40.

Feature Updates

New compilers and tools

Both LLVM/Clang and the GNU toolchain have been updated to new versions, bringing users the latest features, improvements, security and bug fixes.

KDE Plasma 6

KDE Plasma has now been upgraded to version 6! This latest version includes upgrades to the mobile and desktop offerings and the stack is built on Qt 6, meaning significant upgrades to QML & Qt Quick and support for Vulkan.

Podman 5

The latest version of Podman is available in Fedora Linux 40! Users should be able to have an easier time maintaining container.conf files and a better CLI experience, to name a few benefits of this update.

Faster package updates

The DNF package manager now detects when full filelist metadata is required, and doesn’t download it otherwise. This saves time and reduces memory and CPU consumption.

Python 3.7 retiring

The Python 3.7 package is retired in this release, with the end of life date set for June 2024. 

Fedora Linux 40 is available for download now. If you’re already running Fedora Linux, follow the easy upgrade instructions. For more information on the new features in Fedora Linux 40, see the release notes. If you run into a problem, visit the Ask Fedora user support forum, which includes a category for common issues.