Fedora 41 beta arrives, neck-and-neck with Ubuntu

For those on the RPM side of the fence, Fedora 41 has hit beta, and works better in VirtualBox than ever if you're curious to try it.

41 will soon be the latest version of Red Hat's free distro for those who like living on the edge. The beta version appeared last week and release is planned for mid-October. Although Red Hat is thirty something now, as a Linux distro the Fedora project is about the same age as Ubuntu, and they share the same release cadence: two new versions a year, following shortly after the GNOME project releases its semiannual releases.

This means that a given Fedora release tends to have many components in common with the contemporary Ubuntu release. In this case, both Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10 use kernel 6.11, LibreOffice 24.8 and so on. Both default to GNOME 47, and both offer lots of other desktops and editions.

As primary sponsor, Red Hat also sells a separate enterprise distro for corporates, though, there are no long term supported versions of Fedora. Each release gets updates for a year, and if you don't want to upgrade your OS every six months, you can skip every other release and just do it annually. (Oddly, version-to-version upgrades are not such a routine thing in Red Hat land as they are for most other distros. We've heard from several Fedora users that they simply wipe and reinstall every year or so. "Normal" is just what you're used to, after all.)

With a focus on developers and no long term stability to worry about, Fedora tends to include newer versions of programming languages and other programmers' tools, and while current, each version routinely gets new kernel releases. Fedora has a stricter policy on non-FOSS components than Ubuntu and so doesn't include Nvidia's proprietary drivers, it does support installing them, in this release even with Secure Boot enabled. It has new versions of its packaging tools, with the new, faster DNF 5 providing automatic dependency resolution on top of version 4.20 of RPM. This version finally banishes Python 2 (except in the form of the PyPy compiler), along with the no longer open source Redis. The official changelog has a full list of all the new versions.

As with Ubuntu 24.10's beta, we tested the Fedora beta on VirtualBox. We had significant problems with Fedora in VirtualBox a few releases ago, but we reported them, and know that some Fedora folks read the Register. There have been some improvements since then, and we were curious to see how it would cope. Good news: it's much better than before. Fedora detects that it's in a VM and uses an appropriate driver. Wayland is catching up too: it dynamically resizes the desktop to fit the VM window size, a feature previously restricted to X.org. Good job, too: this release drops the GNOME on X.org session, so it's Wayland or the highway.

Due to problems with Nvidia drivers on recent kernels, we tested both in VirtualBox 7.1 under Windows 10, and VirtualBox 7.0 under Linux. The beta worked well under both, although it was significantly slower under Windows, taking half an hour to install and an hour to update. On a Linux host, installation was much faster, taking about a quarter of the time. In VirtualBox for Windows, enabling hardware acceleration for the display didn't work, and there was occasional transient screen corruption, but it always cleared in a fraction of a second. Under Linux, 3D acceleration worked fine, and the result was a positively snappy VM – but with occasional freezes. That can happen with most guest OSes, though: we suspect that VirtualBox 3D passthrough is still a bit of a hack.

Hopping between terminal sessions, we noticed that as soon as you enter a sudo command, the title bar of the terminal turns dark red. If you use sudo -s to get a root shell, it stays that color, warning you that you're in dangerous territory – a very cool touch. Along with its beautiful themes and wallpapers, it looks great.

Even on VirtualBox's default BIOS-based VM, it partitioned the disk with GPT and both a 1MB GRUB BIOS boot partition and a 1GB ext4 /boot volume, with the rest of the space given to a single Btrfs partition. This is configured with separate subvolumes for the root filesystem, /home, and one for /var/lib/machines. Post install, we had to install about a thousand updates – around a gigabyte. Afterwards, df -h reported that, ostensibly, around 4.2GB of disk space were in use – but the amount of free disk space on Btrfs is a bit of a slippery concept.

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The pithy btrfs filesystem df / command reported that there was really some 7GB of data‚ and sudo btrfs filesystem usage / that just over 8GB is allocated. The thing is that the subvolumes have Zstd compression enabled, so data is compressed before it's written to disk. Given Btrfs's questionable record when it comes to robustness, and what its own docs describe as the "dangerous" repair command, this gives us a comparable feeling of trepidation those those in the era of Stacker and Doublespace. We didn't miss that, and had hoped never to feel it again.

At idle, the GNOME edition used about 1.6GB of RAM. This is not a lightweight distro, even in its versions with lighter weight desktops – such as the LXQt spin, which has the new LXQt 2.0 with experimental Wayland support. Saying that, though, this beta gave us less trouble than any of the last half a dozen. Even without the ructions that Ubuntu had switching from GNOME 2 to Unity and then back to GNOME 3, Fedora took a while to mature into stability. We remember using Fedora 14 a decade ago, and it was not a good experience. But it got there in the end, and this is now a world class distro. ®