Today, Tuesday the 29th, the second major launch of this October 2024 has arrived. The first to do so was Ubuntu 24.10, and a few moments ago announced the landing of Fedora 41. We are not trying to pit these big distributions against each other, just to talk about their importance and that both, in their default edition, are the main supporters of GNOME. They also use the same version of the desktop, a GNOME 47 which arrived just over a month ago.
Most of the visible novelties are on used desktops. GNOME 47 The main release is joined by Plasma 6.2 which uses KDE. In addition, Fedora 41 uses a new version of its CLI package management tool, in this case DNF 5. This update is faster, smaller, and requires fewer packages to support. This eliminates the requirement for microdnf for containers, among other things.
Other new features in Fedora 41
Among the other new features, the Default terminal is now Ptyxis, lighter and with some additional features, GNOME Terminal is still there for those who prefer the most popular desktop on Linux.
Continuing with desktops, there is a version of Fedora 41 with KDE Plasma Mobile. And for those who want new experiences, today it has also arrived Fedora Miracle, a new graphical environment built on Mir and Wayland. Although to be more precise with the words, it is a window manager.
For atomic editions, the project is releasing some images with a new tool named bootc. It is a successor of rpm-ostree, and allows you to use container patterns to define a personal Fedora flavor.
Return of support for Secure Boot on systems that require the NVIDIA proprietary driver
Fedora 41, like previous releases, does not include proprietary software by default. But since they don't want to limit the user experience, there are third-party repositories to get it. Secure Boot was disabled by default, and in Fedora 41 it has been re-enabled. When installing the NVIDIA driver, GNOME Software will create a key for the machine owner so that it can be manually enabled.
Among other new features, Firefox supports the camera via PipeWire and MIPI and there are already zero-day updates.
Interested users can download Fedora 41 from their official websiteExisting users can upgrade from previous versions of the operating system.