Fedora 39 Release Debuts With a New Immutable Variant

Fedora is one of the most popular alternatives to Ubuntu, or any other Debian-based distro for that matter.

With every upgrade, it gets better. Fedora 39, the latest in line is here.

Allow me to show you what's being offered with this release.

🆕 Fedora 39 Release: What's New?

a screenshot of the neofetch output on fedora 39

Installer Upgrades
GNOME 45
Updated Application/Packages
Fedora Onyx

Installer Upgrades

a screenshot of the new welcome screen on the fedora 39 installer

Even though the installer has remained unchanged, we now have a new welcome screen that shows up when starting a fresh installation of Fedora. You might have noticed it with updated Fedora 38 ISOs as well.

Furthermore, the Fedora installer now features a bigger EFI System Partition at a minimum size of 500 MB to facilitate firmware updates on modern hardware, as well as for future bootloader features.

You're maybe wondering; what happened to the Anaconda Web UI?

Well, that is targeted for a Fedora 40 debut, and we can't wait to see how it turns out!

GNOME 45

a screenshot of the loupe image viewer and the new system details tab on fedora 39

Fedora 39 features the recently released GNOME 45. This was something I was looking forward to.

The old “Activities” button has been ditched in favor of a pill-shaped dynamic indicator that now shows you the current workspace, as well as the other workspaces.

You can either switch workspaces by scrolling on it, or by clicking on the individual dots.

The 'Settings' app has also received some changes, such as the revamped 'Privacy' tab, and a new “System Details” sub-menu under the 'About' menu.

There are some new core applications like a new image viewer and updates to the rest, I highly suggest you go through our GNOME 45 coverage to explore all the details:

Updated Application/Packages

a screenshot of the applications menu on fedora 39

Fedora 39 also features an updated suite of applications and packages. The major ones include:

LibreOffice 7.6
LLVM 17
Golang 1.21
IBus 1.5.29
Perl 5.38
RPM 4.19
Python 3.12

Fedora Onyx

a screenshot of fedora 39 onyx about info

Earlier this year, a new immutable distro was accepted into Fedora's immutable spins' lineup, called 'Fedora Onyx'.

Back then, we didn't have a concrete release date for it, but now it is finally here with Fedora 39.

This sees Fedora's immutable spins lineup grow to a total of four, joining the likes of Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Fedora Sericea.

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🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements

As for the rest of the changes, here are some notable ones:

Fedora 39 features a green colored bash prompt.
Removal of custom Qt theming for Fedora Workstation.
Implementation of Google Noto fonts for Indic (Indian) languages.
Flatpaks are now not built using modules, instead they use a separate build target.

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