Linux distribution
Nate Drake doffs his hat to the very latest version of Fedora as he gives the Workstation edition a twirl.
Fedora is developed by the community-based Fedora project. It’s the upstream source for both CentOS Stream and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
There are two major OS releases every year, targeted for the fourth Tuesday in April and October. Releases are supported for just 13 months. This review focuses on Fedora 40, which at the time of writing is still in beta, so we encourage you to download and test features for yourself.
This is easier said than done, as visitors to the main website will find there are five editions of flagship Fedora 40 ships with Fedora alone: Workstation, Server, Plasma 6 desktop en CoreOS, IoT and Cloud. It is also available in a variety of spins, such as the immutable Atomic Desktops, and those with alternative desktop environments like KDE, Cinnamon, Budgie and Xfce.
We went mainstream by downloading the 2GB Workstation ISO, which uses Fedora’s default Gnome desktop environment. The latest version of the OS uses Gnome 46, so includes enhancements like the new global search feature, as well as an overhauled file manager and better support for online accounts.
Users of Fedora 40’s KDE spin will also discover the OS now ships with the Plasma 6 desktop environment and uses Wayland. The KDE team, however, promises that X11-native apps will still run under Fedora 40.
After booting Fedora 40 into the live environment, we launched the virtual tour of its latest features via the dedicated app. Here we learned that you can simply tap the Super key to display an overview of windows and apps. The app also provides guidance on how to use trackpad gestures to navigate workspaces.
The Fedora Project website also has an extensive documentation section (https://docs.fedoraproject. org/en-US/docs/), containing release notes, installation instructions and a series of tutorials to get started easily. We’ve given this special mention because, with the exception of Red Hat, this is the most extensive online documentation (ArchWiki wants a word–Ed) we’ve seen
