Fedora 42 has been released!
🎉 So let’s see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic
Desktops variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC
Atomic).
Note: You can also read this post on the
Fedora Magazine.
New COSMIC Atomic variant
The new COSMIC desktop has been packaged for
Fedora and a new Atomic variant created for it thanks to
Ryan Brue. It is not yet available on the
website but should be soon. See
fedora-websites#351.
Edit: It is now live: Fedora COSMIC Atomic.
See the Fedora change request.
Changes for all variants
composefs enabled by default
Following Fedora CoreOS in Fedora 41, Fedora Atomic Desktops are now using
composefs by default. This is an
important first step towards better integrity for the system content.
Note: As a side effect of this change, the systemd-remount-fs.service
unit may fail to start on your system. Until we find a good way to fix this,
you can find a workaround to apply in the
atomic-desktops-sig#72
issue or in the
common issue thread
on the forum.
See the
Fedora change request
and the tracking issue
atomic-desktops-sig#35.
Migration to a static GRUB config
As part of the move to composefs, we had to migrate systems to using a static
GRUB config.
This also removes the duplicated entries in the boot menu for installations
that pre-dates Fedora 41.
The transition will happen automatically during the first boot on Fedora 42.
You can verify that it worked by looking at the status of the
bootloader-update
service:
$ sudo systemctl status bootloader-update.service
We are still missing documentation on how to change some GRUB settings now that
the configuration is static. See the tracking issue
atomic-desktops-sig#73.
Custom keyboard layout set on installation (for LUKS unlock)
This fix is important for setups where the root disk is encrypted with LUKS and
the user is asked a passphrase on boot. The keyboard layout is now set as a
kernel argument during the installation by Anaconda. If you want to later
change the keyboard layout used for the LUKS password prompt, you will have to
update the kernel argument.
Example to set the keyboard layout to the french keyboard:
$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --append=vconsole.keymap=fr
Example to replace an existing layout by another:
$ sudo rpm-ostree kargs --replace=vconsole.keymap=de
See atomic-desktops-sig#6.
No longer building for PPC64LE
According to the countme statistics, we did not have users on PPC64LE, so we
decided to stop building the Fedora Atomic Desktops for that architecture.
If you relied on those images, you can migrate to Fedora Bootc images (which
are available for PPC64LE) or use a conventionnal Fedora package based
installation.
See the Fedora change request.
What’s new in Silverblue
GNOME 48
Fedora Silverblue comes with the latest
GNOME 48 release.
For more details about the changes that alongside GNOME 48, see
What’s new in Fedora Workstation 42
on the Fedora Magazine and
Looking ahead at 2025 and Fedora Workstation and jobs on offer!
from Christian F.K. Schaller.
What’s new in Kinoite
KDE Plasma 6.3
Fedora Kinoite ships with
Plasma 6.3,
Frameworks 6.11 and
Gear 24.12.
See also
What’s New in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 42?
on the Fedora Magazine.
What’s new in Sway Atomic
Nothing specific this release.
What’s new in Budgie Atomic
The default software center for Budgie Atomic is now Plasma Discover. To rebase
from Fedora 41 to 42, you will have to use the command line as rebasing via
GNOME Software will move your system to Fedora Silverblue.
See: fedora-budgie/project/issue/5.
Changes in unofficial images
Until we complete the work needed in the Fedora infrastructure to build and
push official container images for the Atomic Desktops (see
releng#12142 and
cloud-image-uploader#37), I
am providing unofficial builds of those. They are built on GitLab.com CI
runners, use the official Fedora packages and the same sources as the official
images.
You can find the configuration and list on
gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/ci-test
and the container images at
quay.io/organization/fedora-ostree-desktops.
Container images signed with cosign (sigstore)
The unofficial container images are now signed with cosign. You can configure
your system to verify the signature of the images using the instructions from
the project README.
Container images available for aarch64
We are now building all our variants for the aarch64 architecture as well.
Goodbye to Sericea and Onyx (now Sway Atomic & Budgie Atomic)
We have now removed all container images under that name. Use the new names:
Unofficial, experimental Fedora Asahi Remix Atomic Desktops
We are now producing unofficial, experimental bootable container images
targeting Apple Silicon, using the packages from the Fedora Asahi Remix
project.
Those images are in a working state, but the installation procedure is not
ready for general use. We thus only recommend that you give this a try if you
are ready to help with the development or are ready to re-install you system
and lose data.
See: fedora-asahi-remix-atomic-desktops project on GitHub
See also the
Fedora Asahi Remix 42 is now available
posts on the Fedora Magazine.
Note that those images currently do not support the x86 emulation detailed in
New in Fedora: Running x86 programs on ARM systems.
Universal Blue, Bluefin, Bazzite and Aurora
Our friends in the Universal Blue project
(Bazzite, Bluefin,
Aurora) have prepared the update to Fedora 42. Look
for upcoming
announcements in their Discourse.
I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things
are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA
proprietary drivers, extra media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).
What’s next
Roadmap to Bootable Containers
The next major evolution for the Atomic Desktops will be to transition to
Bootable Containers. See also the
Fedora bootc documentation.
We have established a roadmap
(atomic-desktops-sig#26)
and we need your help to make this a smooth transition for all of our existing
users.
Turning the sysext experiment into a good experience
Systemd system extensions (sysexts) are a new option when you need some
applications available on your system and can not run them in containers or as
Flatpaks for various reasons. They offer an alternative approach to package
layering as they do not increase update time and can be enabled or disabled as
needed.
Support for sysexts is still in development for the Atomic Desktops but they
already provide advantages over package layering for some use cases. See the
currently experimental project:
github.com/travier/fedora-sysexts.
Unifying the Atomic Desktops documentation
We would like to unify the documentation for the Fedora Atomic Desktops into a
single one instead of having per desktop environments docs which are mostly
duplicate of one another and need to be constantly synced.
See the tracking issue
atomic-desktops-sig#10 if
you want to help us do that.
Where to reach us
We are looking for contributors to help us make the Fedora Atomic Desktops the
best experience for Fedora users.