Fedora 40 has been released with GNOME 46, KDE Plasma 6, PyTorch integration, and more

Fedora, the popular community-built and maintained Linux distribution, has announced the launch of its 40th release. This new version is powered by the latest Linux 6.8 kernel series and features an array of updates and enhancements.

The distribution now includes the GNOME desktop environment, updated to version 46. The KDE Spin now includes KDE Plasma 6 and supports Wayland out of the box, while still retaining full support for X11 applications.

A significant development is the integration of PyTorch, an open source machine learning framework, directly into the Fedora 40 software repository. This integration facilitates easier user access to PyTorch for their projects. The current package supports CPU running only, without GPU or NPU acceleration. Fedora 40 also includes ROCm 6, an open-source software that provides acceleration support for AMD graphics cards.

The release has enabled IPV4 Address Conflict Detection by default in NetworkManager. This feature aims to address conflicts caused by duplicate IPV4 addresses within the same physical network.

Under the hood, Fedora 40 incorporates GCC 14.0.1, Golang 1.22.2, Python 3.12.3, Perl 5.38, Ruby 3.3.0, PHP 8.3.6, Node.js 20.12.2, OpenJDK 21, Mesa 24.0.5 graphics drivers, LLVM 18, Podman 5, PostgreSQL 16, Kubernetes 1.29, Firefox 125, Wget2, among others.

The Fedora Atomic Desktop brand is being officially revived for all variants that use ostree or image-based provisioning. Since Fedora is not truly immutable, it provides a better grouping. Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite will continue to exist, while the other desktop variants will be transformed into Fedora Sway Atomic and Fedora Budgie Atomic.

Overall, Fedora 40 is a very clean and modern release that solidifies Fedora’s status as one of the best Linux distributions for your desktop.