[NEWS] Fedora 42

[tle]

Fedora 42 ships the nearly-final GCC 15 compiler along with Golang 1.24, the LLVM 20 toolchain, PHP 8.4, Ruby 3.4, and a ton of other software upgrades. If GNOME isn't your thing, KDE Plasma 6.3 is available along with the Xfce 4.20, LXQt 2.1 and Cosmic Alpha 6 desktops. The new kernel 6.14.2 play nicely with ppc64le. I have not encountered any major issue.

GNOME 48 is actually quite good now. The only thing does not work for me is the new Loupe Image Viewer which is unable to view any image.

[ClassicHasClass]

I'll do my normal once over in a week or two when the packages have settled. Good you haven't had any major issues.

[migsutu]

Just finished fresh install of Fedora 42 KDE. Smooth and simple install. No issues found as of yet with the exception of the Discover showing 61 available to install even though command line with dnf says everything is up to date. Fast, responsive. Moving up from Fedora 40. Very happy to get kmail on ppc64le!

[DKnoto]

Is it still possible to fire up an X11 session? Are the packages gone and it can't be done anymore?

[migsutu]

Good question. I have been using Wayland for my day to day since F40 so I can't really comment on it. Wayland has been quite stable since the install yesterday. I'm using an RDNA2 graphics card if that makes any difference.

[migsutu]

One issue I have noticed is the System Monitor in the GUI doesn't show total Memory, Disk and CPU usage at the top. For the individual apps at the bottom it shows correctly. The error pops up "The page is missing some sensors and will not display correctly." Not sure if anyone else has this issue, otherwise smooth. I have been putting F42 through the ringer today.

[ClassicHasClass]

Is it still possible to fire up an X11 session? Are the packages gone and it can't be done anymore?

At least for 41, there was https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/kdesig/plasma6-x11-unsupported/ . GNOME worked in X11 still, and I think that remains the case in 42.

[tle]

Is it still possible to fire up an X11 session? Are the packages gone and it can't be done anymore?

Well GDM has disabled X11 Session. Users are forced to go with Wayland moving forward. To me it makes no difference because X11 apps can function fine with XWayland

[Hasturtium]

I'll defer to ClassicHasClass's preview before leaping in, but F41 was rather nice. Even managed to enable the HEVC decode and encode for my Radeon W6600 where it hadn't worked on F40.

[ClassicHasClass]

Is it still possible to fire up an X11 session? Are the packages gone and it can't be done anymore?

Well GDM has disabled X11 Session. Users are forced to go with Wayland moving forward. To me it makes no difference because X11 apps can function fine with XWayland

Yet another reason not to use gdm for session management ...

[DKnoto]

Well GDM has disabled X11 Session. Users are forced to go with Wayland moving forward. To me it makes no difference because X11 apps can function fine with XWayland

It is not so nice, quite a few applications do not work properly: xwininfo on the desktop or xset.

[Hasturtium]

All right. Clean install of Fedora 42, reusing the /home folder from my prior Fedora install. It’s all Wayland now, and I’ll revisit Xfce at some future point on this machine. I am using mesa-freeworld for accelerated video encoding and playback. Vulkan works within Gnome but KDE reliably chooses llvmpipe over the radeonsi Vulkan driver, as below.

hasturtium@garlic:~$ MESA_VK_DEVICE_SELECT=list vulkaninfo
selectable devices:
  GPU 0: 1002:73e3 "AMD Radeon Pro W6600 (RADV NAVI23)" discrete GPU 0000:03:00.0
  GPU 1: 10005:0 "llvmpipe (LLVM 20.1.1, 128 bits)" CPU 0000:00:00.0

How do I beat it upside the head to understand my point of view?

[ClassicHasClass]

Yeah, looks like X11 is pretty dead for KDE and GNOME. Neither of them will start. Other X11 wms will work fine.

[DKnoto]

Yesterday I tested the installation of F42 on a clean disk with full encryption enabled. The installation went almost perfectly, I had a minor problem with setting up the keyboard. Gnome got up as expected on three monitors, two connected to WX 7100 and one to ASPEED.  Kernel 6.14.0 works fine, SDD is handled extremely fast.

Unfortunately, after upgrading to 6.14.4 and 6.14.5, I can't fire up the machine. The dialog asking for the disk password shows so briefly that I can't manage to enter the password.

[migsutu]

Update. I am continually updating daily. About 2 weeks this broke both kmail and konqueror, with neither loading. Bug reports have been submitted to KDE, link below.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=503528

Otherwise system has been stable and fast with no other major hickups.