Fedora 45 is finally finished and fit
Fedora 45 is here, after not one but two week-long delays as the team found last-minute issues. Although both the original and second announcements were irksomely non-specific, in general we prefer this "when it's ready" approach to the rigid calendar-based schedule that Canonical favors for Ubuntu. It includes six main editions, five immutable desktop variants, and 12 "spins" with different GUIs.
The combined version 45 release notes detail some of the bigger individual component changes and note the hardware requirements. The recommended spec is now a 2 GHz quad-core CPU with 8 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk space, and at least 1024*768 graphics. Fedora 45 supports most display adapters, but 3D acceleration may not work on older GPUs, including Intel models prior to GMA9xx, Nvidia models prior to NV30 (GeForce FX5xxx series), and AMD Radeon models prior to R300 (Radeon 9500).
We took a quick look at the beta back in September, focusing on its new next-generation text console, which is a welcome change. We especially liked the ability to zoom in and out on the text console on the fly, which is something we've missed since the superb "Laptop Ultravision" for DOS, about a third of a century ago. (The company is long gone, but we found a downloadable version for all you DOS users.)
The desktop flagship editions are Workstation 45, which comes with GNOME 51 "A Coruna", and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, with KDE Plasma 6.8. We covered some of the new features in GNOME 51 when we looked at the Ubuntu 26.10 beta, and those changes apply here too - notably, improvements in the Settings app, but removal of some older Nvidia GPU support.
Both the big names are Wayland-only environments now, but by our reckoning, X11 fans have seven of the 12 official spins to choose from: Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, i3, LXQt, LXDE, and Sugar (SOAS) all still use X.org if you prefer. There is also a combined What's New page for all the Atomic Desktops, Fedora's immutable variants - the main shared feature here being the new web-based installer.
The new version of main Fedora is accompanied by Fedora Asahi Remix 45 for Apple Silicon Macs. This is a more notable release than the cross-platform editions, as Asahi 45 brings initial support for M3-based Macs as well as M1 and M2 kit. As The Reg described in September, though, the M3 support is preliminary and limited - for instance, it excludes the M3 Ultra. If you have an M3 Mac, for now, you're better off sticking to macOS.
The most important changes in Fedora 45 are under the hood, which is what the Red Hat release announcement focuses on. It now uses RPM version 6.1, with enhanced package signature checking, and blocks the vendor of packages silently changing. The GNOME keyring now uses the oo7 secrets manager. Support for two old VPN plugins has been removed, because the packages were unmaintained.
A feature that we are happy to see land at last is better support for Red Hat's Stratis next-generation storage subsystem. We gave a potted overview of Stratis 3.3 back in 2022: it was on version 3.3 back then. It's the same main Stratis version 3.9 we saw in Fedora 44, but the installation program now has support for installing Fedora 45 on Stratis storage.
Stratis is Red Hat's rival to OpenZFS. The plan is that Stratis offers similar features and resilience to ZFS, especially in the field of copy-on-write snapshots and simple multi-device logical volume management, but built from all-GPL code. Rather than a whole new filesystem, Stratis integrates XFS, LVM, and the kernel device-mapper functionality. Stratis 1.0 appeared in Fedora 29 eight years ago, and Fedora 45 has version 3.9.3. It's good to see it finally making real progress: if nothing else, we've seen Btrfs irretrievably corrupt a full volume far too many times to ever trust it again, so an alternative is very welcome.
When we looked at Fedora 44, we noted the difficulty of doing custom disk partitioning. It was there, but very well-hidden. Now, the installer can launch the Cockpit web-management tool to make it easier to set up your drives however you want.
An interesting side-effect of the delayed release is that Fedora 45 ships with kernel 7.2 - specifically, version 7.2.15, which is the last release of this short-term series. In other words, it's an end-of-life kernel version. It's an amusing contrast to its near-contemporary Ubuntu 26.10, which shipped with a pre-release kernel. Our test Ubuntu box was automatically upgraded to the release version by the background automatic updates process, but to our surprise, it didn't receive the kernel update for over a week. This shouldn't be a problem: unlike Ubuntu, Fedora releases routinely receive updates to whole new kernel versions, so we're sure Fedora 45 users will get kernel 7.3 very soon.
We upgraded the same test machine on which we tried GNOME 48 in Fedora 42 early last year. You can skip one Fedora release on upgrade, but not two, so we had to go via Fedora 44 - which took some time, and threw up a minor packaging glitch, but it got there. The result runs surprisingly well, although this 2008 machine is well below the recommended spec. (R)