At the end of October, Fedora 41 came out, with more different variants than ever before: 29 by our count, not including all the architectures and download options.

Fedora 41 shipped at the end of October, a little short of three weeks after Ubuntu 24.10. We looked at the beta of the flagship GNOME Workstation about a month before release, but there is a great deal more to the Fedora project than the familiar flagship. It now has so many different variants that they're split into categories to help you keep track.

Editions

There are five "Editions." The flagship GNOME-based Workstation is the most visible, and it supports x86-64, Arm64 and 64-bit little-endian PowerPC. (So that's three variants.)

Then there's Server, also a conventional, customizable distro, with no desktop but with the Cockpit web-based management interface built in, and available for x86-64, Arm64, little-endian PowerPC, and S390, meaning IBM Z mainframes. It also comes in installable ISO form, qcow2 VM images, and network-install ISOs, plus a raw disk image for Arm64. (That's another 13 downloads.)

This isn't the only server edition, though. There are other variants, mostly immutable.

If Fedora Server is mainly for host machines, Fedora Cloud is aimed more at running inside VMs, either locally or in public clouds. Cloud itself has four sub-variants: Cloud Base, Atomic Image, Vagrant images for both of the above, and a Docker image. Six different x86-64 downloads are on offer, plus another seven covering Arm64, ppc64le and s390x. Equally immutable, but more minimal, is the IoT edition aimed at embedding into Internet of Things devices. This too supports several types of Arm hardware as well as x86-64, for six different downloads.

The immutable forms of Fedora are much less malleable. For instance, they come without the dnf command, and you'll have to learn rpm-ostree instead.

Fedora CoreOS is aimed at hosting containers, especially in Kubernetes clusters but also on standalone machines. It too is immutable, but it has its own release cycle, with Stable, Testing and Next versions, all available for the same four CPU architectures as Server. At the time of writing, Stable is still on version 40.20241019.3.0. We won't count it against the total – which so far is up to 38, we think.

Also, as of the next release, there will be six editions, because the KDE desktop spin is getting a promotion – it is now confirmed.

Spins

Back in the land of desktops and laptops and graphical user interfaces, we come to the Fedora Spins. These are conventional graphical desktops, which default to Btrfs but come with a normal package manager and can be customized as you wish. On both x86-64 and Arm64, editions are available with KDE Plasma and the KDE Plasma Mobile desktop for touchscreen devices, as well as Xfce, LXQt, the Miracle-WM tiling compositor, and the Sugar environment from the One Laptop Per Child project. (Another 12.)

Only on x86-64 are six more spins: with Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, the Budgie desktop, and two tiling window managers – i3 for X11 and the Wayland-based Sway.

We reckon we're up to 56 different downloads now, counting all the different formats and CPU architectures, but we aren't done yet. There are also four more Fedora Atomic desktops, which are immutable editions for desktop use. Two have jazzy codenames: Silverblue uses GNOME, and Kinoite uses KDE Plasma. Fedora Sway Atomic uses the Sway tiling Wayland compositor. There's a new addition with the Budgie desktop, at some point known as Onyx but now more sensibly as Fedora Budgie Atomic.

(Had it been up to us, we'd have smuggled in a switch of family and desktop names, to give the splendid Atomic Budgie. Ah well. Perhaps The Register art department can have some fun with what might have been.)

Labs

But wait, there's more! The Fedora Labs contain a further eight desktop bundles which contain various sets of additional applications. So, for instance, the Astronomy Lab combines KDE Plasma with a collection of apps for star-gazers. The Python and Scientific Labs offer three formats each, to which the Python one also adds Arm64 support.

Our estimate is that this brings us to a grand total of 73 different editions and download formats. No wonder the release was a little late.

Testing times

We gave quick test runs to two of the less-often-seen forms, because if we were to install all the different editions on suitable hardware and VMs, we'd still be testing when the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy inspired Fedora 42 came out next year – possibly even on Towel Day.

First we tried the new Miracle-wm spin. This uses the tiling Wayland compositor by Canonical's Matthew Kosarek, with whom the Reg FOSS desk chatted at the Ubuntu Summit. It's still under development, but we looked at version 0.3.0 back in July. It doesn't happen often, but it's not unprecedented for Fedora – or Red Hat itself – to use code that came out of Canonical: for instance, the now-discontinued Upstart init system, which featured in Ubuntu from version 6.10 to 14.10, was also used in Fedora 9 to 14, as well as being part of RHEL 6. Canonical's Mir display server was included as a package in Fedora 40, and now there's an environment that uses it and a spin to show it off.

Fedora Miracle looks pretty good. This spin comes pre-configured with some helpful accessories from the nwg-shell project: there's a top panel provided by nwg-panel, and a vertical dock on the left thanks to nwg-dock, which by default contains a single button to open the nwg-drawer launcher. The terminal emulator is foot and there are a handful of accessories beside Firefox. It's all much friendlier than the setup inside the Miracle-WM snap for Ubuntu, but still, you'll need Miracle's keystroke cheat sheet at first.

It worked, although it feels a little unfinished. For instance, we had to experiment with window sizing a lot in order to get the Anaconda installer's buttons to appear. It's not a super-lightweight distro: it uses about 5.5GB of disk, which Btrfs compresses into 2.5GB of space, and roughly 650MB of RAM at idle. Even so, it's great to see a shipping desktop distro using Mir, which we feel still has potential as a unifying influence between the many separate and independent Wayland compositors out there.

We also gave Fedora Budgie Atomic 41 a quick try. This combines the immutable variant of Fedora with Budgie version 10.9.2. Budgie provides a simple, fast and clean X.org desktop based around GNOME technologies, such as GNOME Terminal 3.54 and Gedit 46.2, but version 6.2.8 of the Nemo file manager from Cinnamon. Aside from the essential accessories and Firefox, there's not a lot here. In resource consumption, it's middle-weight, and felt fast even in a VM; it uses 875MB of RAM at idle, and around 7GB of files compressed into 5.1GB of disk space.

Because this is an immutable distro, you'll need to use Flatpak to find and install any additional components you will went. On our first run, GNOME Software found a whole assortment of updates, which it downloaded. A quick reboot later, our system was current. It all feels very smooth, although we still have reservations about Btrfs' stability if you're incautious enough to let your disk fill up. It seems like a potential weakness in a distro designed for robustness.

If you want just some standard tools that you can get as Flatpaks, then the immutable Fedora editions may well be all you need, and they should require less on-going maintenance than conventional distros. For the occasional one-off tool you could always install something like the Distrobox multi-environment container system, which will let you install and run software packaged for more conventional distros.

When H J Heinz coined his entirely fictional number of varieties in 1896, he already sold more than 60 different products. Fedora's range of offerings is bewilderingly vast, but then, its role is as a technology testbed.

Alongside our mistrust of Btrfs, we are also concerned by the hidden complexity behind the OStree upgrade system that underpins all the immutable offerings in the Fedora family, as well as Flatpak itself. It's significantly more complex than Canonical's Snap system. It was developed in part because Red Hat didn't include a filesystem capable of snapshots, making it ironic that Fedora now uses Btrfs. It remains unclear if the move it is undergoing towards bootable containers makes it noticeably simpler, or simply removes some flexibility.

Saying that, Fedora's range of different offerings dwarfs any other single distribution. While there are legions of different Debian-based and Ubuntu-based meta-distributions, Fedora keeps the majority of them under its own roof. It's good to see this sort of experimentation, but an unintended result could well be decision paralysis.

It's good to see it trying new things, but perhaps some high level oversight and management is needed to collapse some of this dazzling array of offerings into a smaller number of simpler offerings. For instance, a good way to demonstrate composability would be to have a form with a few tick-boxes that let you choose your own flavor:

• Immutable? Yes: ☑ No: ☐
  • Graphics? Yes: ☑ No: ☐
    • Wayland: ☐ X.org: ☑
      • What kind of GUI? Tiling: ☐ Full desktop: ☑
        • Choose your desktop? Pick one.
          • GNOME: ☐
          • KDE Plasma: ☐
          • LXQt: ☐
          • Xfce: ☑
        • Choose an application suite…
          • Just the essentials: ☑
          • Full office desktop: ☐
          • Python development: ☐
          • Astronomy: ☐

Given the current state of Fedora, it would need a lot more options than that, but we hope you get the idea. Right now, there is an embarassment of riches on offer, and including them all would need multiple dual-layer BluRay disks, at 50GB each. (An issue that long-term SUSE enthusiasts will remember from decades ago.)

Fedora is a mature OS now, and its roots even more so. While Fedora Core 1 was 21 years back, Red Hat Linux, the original distro, went into beta at the end of October 1994, a full 30 years before Fedora 41. The signs of middle-aged spread are inescapable. Even so, it's a stable and extremely capable distro now, and both new installs and upgrades should be safe and reliable. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/11/14/fedora_41_a_vast_assortment/