Fedora 40 Linux distribution officially released

Like its big "rival" Ubuntu, Fedora is released every six months, and version 40 of Fedora is now officially available for download. Fedora is quick to incorporate innovations from the Linux world into its own distribution, as the Red Hat-funded community project is the testing ground for CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora 40 Workstation with GNOME 46 and Kernel 6.8

The most notable new feature of Fedora 40 Workstation is the update to the GNOME 46 desktop environment, which includes greatly improved file searching and reorganised system settings. Fedora 40 has also received the latest Linux kernel 6.8, which is of course available in all Fedora 40 spins and the other Fedora versions such as the Server or IoT editions.

The KDE spin of Fedora 40 brings KDE Plasma 6, which by default only runs on the Wayland display protocol. The X11 session is no longer available after a fresh install and must be reinstalled if required. The KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment itself was only released in February and includes numerous bug fixes and minor improvements, as well as porting to the Qt 6 graphics library.

The Firefox web browser has also been updated to version 124 and the latest version of the open source office suite LibreOffice 24.2 can be installed from the Fedora project's package sources. However, the revised package manager DNF5 and a new installer, which are now planned for Fedora 41 instead, did not make it into the Fedora 40 release.

Download from the Fedora Project website

Fedora 40 can be downloaded from the official project page for 64-bit Intel/AMD systems or the ARM64 platform. If you are already using Fedora Linux 39, you can use the DNF package manager or GNOME software to upgrade to Fedora 40.