Announcing Fedora 42

Today, the Fedora Project is excited to announce the general availability of Fedora Linux 42, the latest version of the free and open source operating system. Learn more about the new and updated features of Fedora 42 below and don’t forget to ensure your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release.

Anaconda

• Native Wayland application: Anaconda is now a native Wayland application in F42 Beta. It no longer supports X11 and instead, users can expect to have more consistent keyboard control with Anaconda being able to control keyboard layouts in the Wayland environment on Live ISOs and the remote graphical installations will use RDP instead of VNC.
• New Web UI: The anaconda team have launched a new web user interface (UI) for partitioning in F42 Beta. With this new feature, the biggest benefit to Fedora users is the new guided partitioning function. This provides a more powerful automatic partitioning, where the user will select a goal and have additional customizations possible. This change also comes with a new "reinstall Fedora" which allows users to easily reinstall their system if something went wrong, and easy support for dual-boot. In F42, a new web-based UI for the OS installer is also available, but only for Workstation right now as the default.
• The installer now uses GPT by default on all architectures: In F7, a change which made the Anaconda installer use GPT as the default partition table for x86_64 land. Now in F42,  GPT will now be the default for the other supported architectures (namely ppc64le and s390x) as well ​​when installing on an empty disk or when the disk is being completely reset during the installation. This change simplifies the code path and makes the same default across all architectures and also unifies more of the project's defaults.

KDE Plasma edition

KDE Plasma has been promoted to edition status from F42 Beta onwards! You can expect to continue to enjoy the same level of quality from Fedora KDE as you always have, plus Fedora KDE is now supported on power systems (ppc64le). The full KDE stack (including KDE PIM) is also available on power. Additionally, F42 Beta offers installable live images for OpenPOWER based systems like the Talos Workstation from Raptor Systems.

Fedora Workstation

Fedora Workstation 42 features GNOME 48, with new well-being features as well as accessibility and performance improvements.

Fedora COSMIC spin

We have a new spin! Introducing the Fedora COSMIC spin - a new rust-based desktop environment developed by System76, makers of Pop!_OS. COSMIC has many unique features, such as hybrid per-workspace window/tiling management, window stacks with tabs to switch between windows and robust customization features that integrate with GTK and (later on) Qt! 

IBus speech-to-text

In F42, ibus-speech-to-text provides a new input method that enables voice dictation in any application supporting IBus. It offers offline voice recognition, preserving user privacy, supports multiple languages through downloadable models, and integrates seamlessly with existing IBus infrastructure.

EROFS for live media

We’ve switched the read-only filesystem image format from SquashFS to EROFS for Fedora live media for all kiwi-produced live media, such as KDE desktop and mobile, COSMIC, Budgie, MiracleWM, Fedora CoreOS live media and more. This change aligns with our downstream and RHEL, which creates a more efficient ecosystem for developers to work in both upstream and downstream.

Firewalld IPv6 is default to Loose on Fedora Workstation

Connectivity checks are expected to work properly on multi-homed, e.g. wifi + LAN, workstation in the F42 release by defaulting Workstation to use IPv6_rpfilter=loose . This helps avoid certain scenarios that can degrade user experience when switching between modes of connectivity.

Gnome Shell Extension Dependency Generator

In F42, we have added a dependency generator for GNOME Shell extensions to make the binary RPM depend on the correct versions of GNOME Shell. This will result in an improved user experience for our users, because extensions that install are now more likely to work, and will also help extension packagers, as they get an early signal that an extension needs to be updated, by getting a Fails To Install bug not long after the mass rebuild is complete.

Fedora WSL

Recent versions of Windows support running Linux guests via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). These can be distributed via tarballs, Appx packages, or via the Windows Store. From Fedora Linux 42, we have started producing Fedora images for users of WSL. A dedicated image with documentation allows people to easily try out a Fedora environment from their Windows installations, so when it comes time to install a Linux distribution on their computer, they can be more confident when choosing Fedora.

Feature updates

DNF5

There has been some work done with DNF5 that now includes new logic that will remove expired and obsolete repository keys from the system, which means users can enjoy the automatic management of repository keys during software installation or upgrades. 

More MIPI Camera Hardware Enablement

The initial IPU6 camera support landed in Fedora 41, and in this release we are adding support for more MIPI (non USB) cameras found on x86 laptops and tablets, meaning in this release the camera on X86 laptops with MIPI cameras should work out of the box on more laptop models.

NumPy2

F42 Beta will include an update to NumPy2. Most packages will be unaffected, but those using the C API may need to rebuild. This update brings more up to date fixes, performance improvements and better documentation.