Fedora 40 Beta now available

Today, the Fedora Project is excited to announce the beta availability of Fedora 40, the latest version of the free and open source Fedora Linux operating system. Fedora 40 Beta isn’t short on new and updated features that bring open source innovations to our end users. While we’ll have more to share with the general availability of Fedora 40 later this spring, there’s plenty in Fedora 40 Beta to get excited about.

What’s new in Fedora 40 Beta?

Fedora 40 Beta introduces several new features to the workstation, including:

• AI enablement
  • PyTorch: A high demand machine learning framework that is widely used for image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and other AI applications. PyTorch provides a user-friendly interface for building and testing complex machine learning models. The current build enables CPU-based computation as a first step to making this important tool easier to access. Accelerator support is planned for future releases.
  • ROCm 6 release: Enables the newest flagship datacenter GPU, the AMD Instinct MI300, as well as continuing all previously enabled GPUs.
• Fedora IoT bootable containers: Provides an operating system suitable for edge and IoT use cases. ostree-native containers and bootable containers are new mechanisms for building and delivering OSTree content.
• Image generation
  • Build Fedora Cloud Edition Images Using Kiwi in Koji: Kiwi will replace the current unmaintained ImageFactory tooling used to build cloud base images.
  • Build Fedora workstation live ISO with image builder: Creates additional, non-blocking Fedora Workstation live ISO using image builder

Feature updates found in Fedora 40 Beta

• KDE Plasma 6: The newest, major release of the KDE desktop.
• Fedora Atomic Desktops: All desktop, rpm-ostree based variants of Fedora (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway and Budgie) will be grouped under the “Fedora Atomic Desktops” name, with Sericea now known as Fedora Atomic Sway.
• Podman 5: Continues to evolve to make it even easier to manage containers in Fedora.
• Build Fedora with DNF 5: Updates the Mock configuration in Mock, Koji and Copr to use DNF 5 as Mock’s package manager. DNF 5 is used by Mock to install build dependencies into chroots for package builds.
• Do not download filelists by default: Changes the DNF behavior so they don’t download by default. This metadata describes all the files contained within each package and are unnecessary in many use cases.

What is a Fedora Beta release?

Fedora Beta releases are code-complete and will very closely resemble the final release. While the Fedora Project community will be testing this release intensely, we also want our end users to check and make sure that the features you care about are working as intended. The bugs you find and report help make your experience better as well as for millions of Fedora Linux users worldwide! Together, we can help not only make Fedora Linux stronger, but as these fixes and tweaks get pushed upstream to the kernel community, we can contribute to the betterment of the Linux ecosystem and free software holistically.

Let’s test Fedora 40 Beta together

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the test mailing list or in the #quality:fedoraproject.org channel on Fedora Chat (Matrix). As testing progresses, common issues are tracked in the “Common Issues” category on Ask Fedora.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.