As a Fedora user myself, I was interested in looking at some of the changes in Fedora 41. As of today, the stable has been released and you can download it from Fedora’s Website.
DNF5 by Default (at last!)
Perhaps one of the most noticable change that Fedora users will notice is that DNF has been upgraded, after it has been pushed back by a release or two. This includes a rewrite in C++ and brings a noticable performance improvement when it comes to installing packages. Compared to other package managers like Pacman and APT, DNF used to be a lot slower from my observations, and this will be one of the biggest benefits to Fedora.
I have been running DNF5 on my laptop since Fedora 40 and have seen a big boost in speed compared to the old DNF.
Gnome 47
Fedora updates are in line with the GNOME release cycle, and so GNOME 47 has been added. This brings a handful of minor changes, which are listed on the GNOME Website.
The biggest (or technically smallest) change is that X11 is no longer installed by on GNOME by default. Since NVIDIA support has improved recently, this should be less of an issue for most people. My desktop and laptop both use AMD graphics so Wayland has never been an issue, hence I have been using it since day 1 on all distros. Some might say this is too soon, but Fedora has a history of implementing new things early like pipewire, btrfs, Wayland itself (since 2015!) and systemd. I would say that the Linux desktop would be behind if it wasn’t for a big distro implementing new technology.
For those wondering what Plasma version ships in 41, it’s currently Plasma 6.2.2, the same as what 40 ended with. Even though Fedora has fixed releases (39, 40, etc), the Plasma version is updated as it comes out (more akin to a rolling release) because old versions are no longer maintained.
Some of the Changes
- Added accent colours
- UI dialogs tweaked (the shutdown/logout ones)
- File chooser has been tweaked, now Nautilus itself and can remember bookmarks
- Default terminal emulator has been changed to Ptyxis
My Take
I’ve spoken about GNOME before and I like it as a desktop, including libadwaita. Even though I would say it has a better app ecosytem than KDE, I prefer KDE as a more advanced desktop environment.
GIMP 3
Although this isn’t directly related to Fedora, GIMP 3 is coming in Fedora 41. As of writing it is still a development version (version 2.99), though it does bring some changes, including:
- Non destructive filters
- UI in GKT3 (incl. Wayland Support)
- Better layers support, including multi layer selection
What I Think of Fedora
Fedora has been my daily driver on my laptop since I got it (about 3 months ago). I really like it for its simplicity for those who want a working desktop (like GNOME or KDE) which has its packages updated often.