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What's New in Fedora 45 | Fedora Podcast 064

·5 mins
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Every six months a new version of Fedora lands, and if we’re being honest, most of us hit upgrade without really reading the release notes. Fedora 45 has a few changes you want to know about before you hit that button, not after. So Noah and I went to the person who runs the release.

Fedora Podcast · Episode 64 Open the full episode page →

Aoife Moloney is the Fedora Operations Architect. In her words, she doesn’t touch the operating system itself. She watches the clock, the Gantt chart, and every deadline and milestone between here and release day. Her engineering friends call themselves grease monkeys. She calls herself a paper monkey. I’d go with lead cat herder. Fedora 45 is also her first release back after a year away, and she upgraded her own machine the same day we recorded.

I recorded this one from a hotel room in Texas, right before Texas Linux Fest, so if the background looks unfamiliar, that’s why.

A few things worth carrying away:

  • For most people, it just works. That was Aoife’s headline, and it matches what I keep hearing. She upgraded her Slimbook from the terminal at the kitchen table while holding a one year old who is learning to walk. Done in minutes. Compare that to the old days, when I’d block off an entire afternoon for a Fedora upgrade.
  • Read the after-upgrade steps. I used to skip them. Don’t. The upgrade docs now walk you through cleaning up packages and libraries you no longer need, and if you follow them step by step your system ends up in a really nice state.
  • If you connect to work over a VPN, check this first. The NetworkManager vpnc and fortisslvpn plugins are being retired. If your job depends on a Cisco or Fortinet style VPN setup, save your configuration and read the Fedora Magazine article on migrating before you upgrade.
  • RPM now refuses unsigned packages by default. That’s a real behavior change. It cuts down on random packages from anywhere ending up on your system. If you build your own packages and know what you’re doing, there’s a documented workaround in the change’s release notes.
  • Nearly every package is now expected to be reproducible. Fedora 44 got to roughly 90 percent. Fedora 45 is somewhere around 99. Aoife made a point I liked here: if you can build a package locally and get the exact same output, that’s a confidence boost for anyone thinking about becoming a package maintainer, not just a security win.
  • GNOME 51 and KDE Plasma 6.8 both landed. Quick correction from me: on air I said Plasma 6.7. It’s 6.8. Aoife’s favorite GNOME touch is the little counter badge that shows how many files you’re dragging. On the Plasma side she called out the new dwell clicker, which sends a click when your pointer stops moving. That’s a big deal for anyone with hand cramps or mobility issues.
  • Upgrade now, or give it a week or two? If you’re a general desktop user, Aoife’s advice was simple: do it now. If you lean on a lot of extensions and plugins, give it a week or two for upstream patches to catch up. And if you’re still on 43, it goes end of life in about a month, so plan your upgrade now.

We also got into the Atomic desktops moving to Image Builder. I have a soft spot for Image Builder. Back when I was at Red Hat it was one of the pieces of RHEL I did technical marketing for, and I still think of it as an à la carte menu for your OS. Pick your packages, users, keyboard, time zone, services and firewall ports, save it as a blueprint, and ship it anywhere. Seeing Atomic and bootc pick that up is exciting.

The part I most want people to hear is how to get involved, because the answer isn’t “be a kernel engineer”:

  • Release notes. Every approved change gets a release notes ticket on Fedora Forge. Comment that you’ll write one, reference the change proposal, and Petr Bokoč on the docs team will help you through it. It’s one of the best first steps into a Fedora release there is.
  • Test weeks. QA posts them by email, with the steps, the commands, and the expected output already written for you. You just run it and report what you see. Failure is useful data. You don’t need a kernel engineering degree.
  • Change proposals. Fedora 46 is already open. Aoife pointed to the ptrace change in 45 as an example. It went through several rounds of proposals and discussion before it was approved, and community feedback shaped where it landed. If you have opinions about what goes into 46, now is when they count. The deadline for system-wide changes lands right around Christmas.
  • Wallpaper ideas. The design team is taking inspiration for Fedora 46 now too.

Before we wrapped, Aoife added two things we hadn’t covered: RISC-V images are available for some systems (still a secondary architecture, but there’s a group working hard on it), and Stratis storage is now in the Anaconda installer. Stratis deserves its own episode, honestly.

Noah and I are also talking about a livestream later in November where I move my bootc home lab from Fedora Server 44 to 45 and we watch the pipelines either work or not. Keep an eye out for that.

One last thing. As of this recording, the Fedora Project YouTube channel passed 15,000 subscribers. Thank you to everyone who listens, watches and shares the show. And Aoife is officially the first equestrian we’ve had on the Fedora Podcast. The challenge is on to make sure she isn’t the last.

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