Changes in Fedora 41 For Desktop Users

Previously, nVidia driver installation had been removed from GNOME Software because it didn’t support Secure Boot, which is increasingly-often enabled by default, especially on laptops. This change brings the option back for Fedora Workstation users with Secure Boot supported. This is good news for those who want to use Fedora for gaming and CUDA. The change also helps Fedora stay relevant for AI/LLVM workloads.

When installing these drivers, you will be prompted to create a password for a key which will be used by the mokutil utility to authenticate the driver. After rebooting your system, you will be shown the mokutil interface which will ask you for the same password. Upon entering it, the driver installation will be completed and you will be able to proceed as normal, with nVidia drivers installed and enabled. The entire process is also explained in GNOME Software when installing these drivers.

For more information about mokutil, see Fedora Quick Docs.

This release introduces the Fedora Miracle Window Manager Spin. The Fedora Miracle Window Manager Spin aims to provide the premiere Miracle window manager experience on top of Fedora Linux, the leading edge platform for developers and users alike.

The Miracle window manager is a tiling window manager based on the Mir compositor library. While it is a newer project, it contains many useful features such as a manual tiling algorithm, floating window manager support, support for many Wayland protocols, proprietary Nvidia driver support, and much more. Miracle will provide Fedora Linux with a high-quality Wayland experience built with support for all kinds of platforms, including low-end ARM and x86 devices. On top of this, Fedora Linux will be the first distribution to provide a Miracle-based spin, ensuring that it will become the de facto distribution for running Miracle.

To try Miracle, install the miracle-wm package and select it at login, or install using the new spin available at link:https://fedoraproject.org/.

Fedora 41 changes the default input method for Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), the zh_TW locale, from ibus-libzhuyin to ibus-chewing. ibus-chewing is the ibus front-end of the libchewing library. Chewing (新酷音, link:https://chewing.im/) is one of the most popular and featureful IM among zh_TW users.

Starting with Fedora 41, the Workstation edition install media only contain Wayland GNOME packages, and no X11 ones. X11 packages are still available in Fedora update repositories, but are no longer used on the installation media. If you perform a new installation and wish to use X11, install the gnome-session-xsession and gnome-classic-session-xsession packages, and select the X11 session during the next login.

This release brings the Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile Spin and its corresponding Atomic variant: Kinoite Mobile. Built on the foundations of KDE Plasma Desktop, KDE Plasma Mobile and Kinoite Mobile bring its flexibility to a mobile form factor. Although originally geared towards phones, the touch friendly interface works very well on tablets and 2-in-1 laptops.

Fedora 41 provides version 3 of the TaskWarrior command line TODO list manager. Note that users of the previous version will have to migrate their lists manually; see the upstream migration guide for instructions.

A compatibility package named task2 is also available for those who do not want to switch to version 3. Note that older versions are not being maintained by upstream.

The LXQt desktop environment in Fedora 41 has been upgraded to version 2.0, which is built on Qt 6 and adds experimental Wayland support.

For more information, see the upstream release announcement.

Fedora 41 has added support for IPU6 cameras on laptops using ov2740, ov01a10 and hi556 sensors using the IPU6 CSI-receiver (isys) driver. This support requires using applications which support accessing cameras through pipewire such as Firefox. This change enables out-of-the-box support for cameras on some modern laptops which are directly attached to the CPU or SoC over a MIPI CSI2 data bus, instead of the more common USB UVC protocol.

This release of Fedora Linux updates GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, to major version 3, with many new features and improved user experience. Existing third party GIMP plugins for version 2 may not work with this new version. Note that the version packaged in Fedora 41 at release is a pre-release version (version 2.99), as upstream currently does not have a full release. It will be updated once upstream is ready.

GIMP 2 has been removed from Fedora due to its dependency on Python 2, which has also been removed in this release. If you wish to continue using GIMP 2, you can install it as a flatpak from Flathub.