Fedora 40 Released

Fedora 40 is now officially available! After spending more than a decade mainly using Debian-based distributions on my personal computers, I swapped to Fedora just a few weeks after the release of Fedora 36 after running into a series of issues trying to upgrade Pop!_OS. I’ve been extremely happy with Fedora so far and was happily looking forward to this latest version. It’s been a rock-solid distribution that also does a great job of using a lot of vanilla components. For example, they don’t attempt to add a bunch of things on top of Gnome or customize it; it’s a default experience out of the box, and I appreciate that.

I haven’t had a ton of time to explore Fedora 40 yet after upgrading from Fedora 39 a little earlier on in the evening, but there’s a comprehensive official blog post covering all of the new features. As someone who takes their laptop out and about a decent bit, I’m particularly interested in trying out the new individual, stable MAC address assignments for WiFi:

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.

The only oddity I ran into with the upgrade was that it was not available through the Software application, which is the officially recommended way to perform the upgrade for Fedora Workstation installations. After installing all available updates, rebooting, and then checking for fresh updates, it simply told me there was nothing available. I checked for additional updates via dnf (there weren’t any) and even gave the system another reboot, but it didn’t make a difference.

Rather than fuss over it too long, I instead just opted for the CLI upgrade since that’s how I install package and system updates an overwhelming majority of the time. I already had the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package installed, so I simply had to run the following to download everything needed, get updated keys, etc.

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40

Then I kicked off the installation with:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

More details on the CLI upgrade process can be found in the official docs. After maybe around 15 – 20 minutes, I was sitting at my shiny new Fedora 40 setup. I’m excited to dive into it more over the coming days.