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

What’s new in Fedora 42 Beta?

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.
• Web UI partitioning: 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 installation. Users only need to make a free space and don’t have to understand other details.
• Web UI is now default for Fedora Workstation: This new web-based UI for the OS installer is now default for Fedora Workstation in F42 Beta. This means that users can enjoy a smooth installation experience, with features such as an installation progress indicator, built in help, configuration review and more. This new feature also includes Wizard that will allow users to skip what they don’t need at installation. 

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 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! 

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.

RPM support for systemd sysusers.d

RPM supports creating users and groups according to configuration provided in sysusers.d snippets shipped in package payload. This new feature goes towards fully integrating this RPM functionality in Fedora.

DNF/RPM copy on write for all variants

The RPM copy on write feature will provide a better experience for Fedora users as it reduces the amount of I/O and offsets CPU cost of package decompression. RPM copy on write uses reflinking capabilities in btrfs, which has been the default filesystem since Fedora 33 for most variants. Note that this behavior is not being turned on by default for this change. 

Setuptools 74+

Fedora 42 Beta will include the latest upstream release of python-setuptools. Setuptools is a package development process library designed to facilitate packaging Python projects by enhancing the former Python standard library distutils (distribution utilities). It changes quickly and often introduces breaking changes such as the removal of the setup.py test command in version 72.0.0 which was deprecated in 2019.

If your Fedora package still uses the setup.py test command, please update to %pytest, %tox, %{python3} -m unittest, etc.

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. 

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.

Ruby 3.4

Ruby 3.4 is the latest stable version of Ruby. Many new features and improvements are included for the increasingly diverse and expanding demands for Ruby. With this major update from Ruby 3.3 in Fedora 41 to Ruby 3.4 in Fedora 42, Fedora becomes the superior Ruby development platform. 

Retirements and deprecations

Retiring of python3.8

The python3.8 package will be retired without replacement beginning with Fedora Linux 42. As Python 3.8 is EOL, and Ubuntu’s LTS also goes out of standard support by the release time of F42, we will no longer be supporting this version in Fedora Linux.

Python-pytest-runner

The python-pytest-runner package will be deprecated in F42 Beta. Dependent packages are encouraged to switch to using pytest directly.

Atomic Desktops will no longer be built for PPC64LE

From F42 Beta, we will no longer be building Fedora Atomic Desktops for PowerPC 64 LE. Users of Atomic Desktops on PPC64LE can either switch back to a Fedora package mode installation, or build their own images using bootable containers which are available for PPC64LE. 

Retirement of Zezere provisioning server for Fedora IoT

We will be retiring the use of the Zezere provisioning server, which is currently used to configure Fedora IoT devices. Instead, we’ve moved the Zezere provisioning server in favour of offering a local means for user configuration – systemd-firstboot. This will provide users with a more robust, well-tested configuration method that is already installed by default with systemd. Users will still be able to use the existing configuration options of FIDO Device Onboarding or ignition. 

What is a Fedora Beta release?

Fedora Beta releases are code-complete and will very closely resemble the final release. While the Fedora Project community will be testing this release intensely, we also want our end users to check and make sure that the features you care about are working as intended. The bugs you find and report help make your experience better as well as for millions of Fedora Linux users worldwide! Together, we can help not only make Fedora Linux stronger, but as these fixes and tweaks get pushed upstream to the kernel community, we can contribute to the betterment of the Linux ecosystem and free software holistically.

Let’s test Fedora 42 Beta together

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the test mailing list or in the #quality:fedoraproject.org channel on Fedora Chat (Matrix). As testing progresses, common issues are tracked in the “Common Issues” category on Ask Fedora.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.