Fedora 40 Available with KDE Plasma 6, GNOME 46, ROCm 6, and PyTorch

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Fedora 40 is now available as the new stable version of the community distribution sponsored by Red Hat, which serves as a testing ground for future technologies that will later be implemented in RHEL. This time, we essentially find an update of the usual features, but KDE Plasma manages to steal some of the spotlight from GNOME, and the repositories now include ROCm 6 and PyTorch.

Starting with the more "tangible" aspects of desktop systems, the first thing we find is that the Xorg session is no longer pre-installed in the KDE Plasma spin, a change that has also been extended to the atomic desktop Kinoite. Fedora aims to launch KDE Plasma 6 with a bang by finally setting the Wayland session as the default, which, combined with the distribution's experimental nature, has prompted the decision we now know about.

The second significant update in Fedora 40 is the inclusion of ROCm 6 in the repositories, the latest version of AMD’s framework that provides hardware acceleration support (GPU) for certain professional tasks such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The presence of this component is important and may open the door to facilitating the use of applications like DaVinci Resolve and other professional solutions on Radeon graphics, especially since ROCm, although open-source, can be complex to install on Linux and officially only supports a very limited catalog of distributions.

PyTorch, the well-known machine learning framework primarily developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) and open-source under the three-clause BSD license, debuts in Fedora's repositories with distribution version 40. Like ROCm, it is a component more oriented towards professional tasks than to the average home user, but its presence strengthens Fedora's appeal to a key target audience: developers. The current package only supports CPU execution, so it does not support GPU or NPU acceleration, but it is at least a step forward.

While KDE Plasma has gained significant prominence in recent years, even to the point of being proposed as the default desktop of the distribution, Fedora remains one of the most well-known and recognized faces of GNOME. Here we encounter GNOME 46 and its default experience, with the only addition of an extension that displays the Fedora logo in the bottom right corner if the default desktop background is left unchanged. With this approach, one knows what to expect, making it more interesting to note that the Xorg session will no longer be pre-installed in Fedora Workstation 41, a change almost certainly extending to Silverblue.

Another highlight of Fedora 40 is the use of native OSTree containers or containers that can be booted in the IoT edition, which "are a new and interesting mechanism for creating and delivering OSTree content."

The basic components present in the systems are Linux 6.8.5, Mesa 24.0.5, PipeWire 1.0.4, Wireplumber 0.5.0, OSTree 2024.5, fwupd 1.9.15, and systemd 255. However, the latter is the only one truly significant, not because the others are unimportant, but because they are updated continuously during the life cycle of a Fedora version. Major versions of the desktops also remain static during the same period.

Regarding programming technologies and software development, Fedora 40 brings default use of OpenJDK 21 to cover Java, Golang 1.22, LLVM 18.1, GCC 14, Python 3.12, Rust 1.77, Glibc 2.39, Binutils 2.41, PHP 8.3, Podman 5, Ruby 3.3, and Ruby on Rails 7.0.8. As for servers, among others, there are Apache 2.4.59 (here the package is called httpd), nginx 1.24, MariaDB 10.11.6, and PostgreSQL 16.1.


It's worth noting that Fedora 40 will be the basis for CentOS Stream 10, which in turn will be the starting point for the development of RHEL 10. This makes this release of the community distribution quite important for what is the most influential corporate distribution in the Linux world.

Although this entry has focused on KDE Plasma and GNOME because these desktops often lead in technology, which is consistent with Fedora's position within the Linux ecosystem, there are mutable spins with Cinnamon, Xfce, MATE, i3, Sway, LXDE, and LXQt, as well as atomic desktops (formerly immutable desktops) with Sway and Budgie. Supported architectures are 64-bit x86, 64-bit ARM, and 64-bit little-endian PowerPC, but not all editions, immutable desktops, and spins support all architectures.

Those who want to know all the details about Fedora 40 can look at the official announcements (general, Workstation, and KDE) and the change list, while systems can be obtained through direct download or torrent.

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