The Fedora Project has released Fedora Workstation 39, the latest version of its flagship desktop Linux operating system.
Fedora Workstation 39 brings a number of new features and improvements, including an updated desktop experience with GNOME 45, better hardware support and performance with the Linux 6.5 kernel, and some smaller changes to finesse the overall experience.
Many of the new features in Fedora 39 will be familiar to those using Ubuntu 23.10, which also offers GNOME 45 and Linux 6.5.
Fedora 39: What’s New?
As you’d expect, Fedora 39 offers a best-in-class GNOME 45 experience, shipping things more or less as upstream intended.
Users benefit from a new dynamic workspace indicator, keyboard backlight toggle in Quick Settings, privacy-enhancing webcam activity indicator, and compact system info dialog in Settings.
Fedora 39 also ships GNOME’s new image viewer app (which you may know as Loupe). Written in Rust and GTK4/libadwaita, this app offers a more modern image viewing experience (and better print support) than what’s offered by Eye of GNOME (which Ubuntu uses).
It’s also now possible to remove user data when uninstalling Flatpak apps in GNOME Software; copy files, images, and text over RDP connections through the included Connections client; and enjoy the immensely satisfying snappy scrolling in the Calendar app.
Fedora Workstation 39 offers peppier performance throughout the GNOME desktop stack, enabling hardware-accelerated video decoding where supported, reducing cursor stutter and latency, and making search faster throughout many of its core apps.
A coloured Bash prompt is also included by default. This is something I’d dearly love to see Ubuntu adopt as, honestly, we could all use a splash more colour in our lives!
Fittingly, Fedora 39 arrives 20 years and 1 day after Fedora Core 1 was released November 6, 2003.
Overall, Fedora Workstation 39 is a decent update that delivers new features, enhances the user experience, and improves overall performance. Anyone looking to dip their toes into the world of non-Ubuntu distros will find this release a solid choice for both developers and everyday users.
Download Fedora Workstation 39
Want to try it out? Head to the Fedora website to download Fedora Workstation 39. It comes as an ISO that you can write to a USB or SD card to boot from, or you can use as a boot image in virtual machine software.
If you already use Fedora 38 you can upgrade to the latest version through the GNOME Software app (once you’ve installed all pending updates), or by running dnf system-upgrade in your chosen terminal tool.