Back in my nascent days of using Linux as a desktop operating system, I was guilty of distro-hopping all the time. Every time something new released, I would want to try it out and learn the differences. Now that I’m older with less free time and about 18 years of using Linux under my belt, I’m far less concerned with trying everything and more concerned with just having something that works. When I need to make an update to a client website, for example, I don’t want to be in the position of having to fight with my laptop for an hour beforehand because something broke in a recent update.
With that being said, hot on the heels of my Fedora 40 release post, I’m still enjoying Fedora and using it for the release of Fedora 41. I’ve stuck with Fedora since I started using it with Fedora 36, and I remain extremely pleased with it. Unlike the weirdness I saw with my upgrade from 39 to 40, the upgrade from 40 to 41 worked fine from the UI. I clicked a button, and roughly 30 minutes later I was booted in Fedora 41.
There are a ton of updates under the hood, most of which I won’t detail here. The work on that has already been done at Fedora Magazine. There are two big ones I wanted to briefly cover, though. The first is the upgrade to GNOME 47. While it’s not a massive difference, one touch I really like is the ability to choose an accent color. It seems silly, but I honestly got used to having the color of my choice in macOS, so it’s nice to see this on Fedora as well. To the surprise of no one who knows me in real life, I went with purple.
The other big change was a swap of the default terminal from GNOME Terminal to Ptyxis. As someone who tends to spend a lot of time in a terminal, I was interested to try out something deemed solid enough to replace the venerable GNOME Terminal. So far I’ve been enjoying it. It seems snappy with solid defaults and easy configuration. One thing worth mentioning, though, is that it’s only the default terminal for fresh installs. If you’re upgrading from Fedora 40, then GNOME Terminal will still be the default; Ptyxis won’t even be installed. I simply opted to install it so that I could try it out. On the other hand, if you do a fresh install but would prefer GNOME Terminal, that’s also still available.
Fedora 41 seems like another solid release. While there are tons of options out there in the world of desktop Linux, I remain impressed with how robust Fedora always is. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking to dip your toes into desktop Linux for the first time or if you’re looking to swap things up from your current distro.