Changes in Fedora 42 For Desktop Users

Fedora COSMIC Spin

This release introduces the Fedora COSMIC Spin, which offers many unique features, for example:

  • Hybrid per-workspace tiling management.

  • Window stacks with tabs to switch between windows.

  • Customization features that integrate with the GTK toolkit.

XFCE 4.20

Fedora 42 ships with version 4.20 of the XFCE desktop environment. A notable change is experimental Wayland support.

For more information about this release, see the upstream changelog.

LXQt 2.1

The LXQt desktop environment has been updated to version 2.1 in Fedora 42, and now uses Wayland by default through miriway.

See the upstream release announcement for more details about this release.

KDE Plasma is now a full Edition

Fedora Linux 42 promotes the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop variant to full Edition status.

FEX emulator on Fedora

Fedora now provides FEX, a fast emulator that allows one to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on an AArch64 Linux host. FEX requires a number of supporting components, including a RootFS image, and integration with muvm to support 16k page-size hosts. The purpose of this Change is to integrate FEX itself and its supporting components into Fedora Linux, to provide a delightful out-of-box experience for users that want to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on their aarch64 systems. This also includes integration into the AArch64 Fedora KDE spin as a non-blocking component of the spin.

To start using FEX, run dnf install @fex-x86-emulation.

There is a detailed Q&A section on the Change page which provides additional information about FEX.

Replace SDL 2 with sdl2-compat using SDL 3

Applications that use SDL 2 (typically games) will now transparently use SDL 3 through the sdl2-compat package. This makes it so applications that historically used SDL 2 now use SDL 3. The change is completely automatic and users should not notice any difference other than potentially slightly smoother performance.

IBus 1.5.32

Fedora 42 provides version 1.5.32 of the IBus internationalization library. Notable improvements include:

  • Support for the Wayland input-method protocol version 2 which is allowed by some Wayland desktop sessions likes Sway, Hyprland, COSMIC desktop sessions

  • IBus now can show candidate popups for non-Wayland applications of XIM and GTK2 in Wayland desktop sessions

  • The ibus start command is now enhanced to work for the Wayland input-method protocol version 2

See here for information on IBus configuration in various desktop environments.

ibus-speech-to-text feature

The new ibus-speech-to-text package introduces voice dictation capabilities for any application that supports IBus input methods. The feature uses the VOSK speech recognition toolkit that does not require Internet connectivity.

Benefits to users:

  • Accessibility and user productivity improvements through voice input

  • Offline voice recognition to preserve user privacy

  • Seamless integration with existing IBus infrastructure

  • Support for multiple languages through downloadable models

ibus-libpinyin 1.16

The ibus-libpinyin 1.16 library has been updated to version 1.16 in Fedora 42. Notable new features include:

  • Support for punctuation candidates

  • Support for custom keyboard layouts

  • The [ ] keys now scroll the candidate page up/down

  • Displaying Lua converters in the input method menu

  • Notifying the user when import of a pinyin or table file is finished

X86 MIPI camera hardware enablement

Ferdora 42 expands out of the box support for additional integrated cameras found on x86 laptops and tablets. This change is part of an ongoing effort in camera enablement on Fedora, and follows a similar change in Fedora 41.

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