Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is "reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025" by highlighting the year's most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features -- while openly grappling with controversial shifts such as dropping 32-bit support and modernizing long-standing subsystems.

"Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world," writes Larabel. "Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year."

Innovation != better

[JamesTRexx]

The word has been so abused that I become suspicious every time I hear it.

Especially now that Fedora is IBM.

Re:

[gweihir]

Indeed. And when the "innovation" is "Weyland on Gnome". Seriously, I do not use either and I do not plan to. I just want my systems to work.

Re:

[sjames]

That's an innovation in almost exactly the way that crapping on the office floor is.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

well That is an invasive way of getting fired I suppose

Re: Innovation != better

[strawspulled]

Fedora is a community project, funded by Red Hat. I don't think IBM would be spending time having any input there.

Re: Innovation != better

[joaommp]

They do and it's well known, as well as being the beach head to influence freedesktop.org

Remember when IBM innovated?

[_merlin]

IBM pioneered out-of-order execution, microcoded CPUs, RISC architectures, hardware-independent bytecode, and all sorts of cool stuff. They're a sad shadow of their former glory now.

Works for me

[Kernel Kurtz]

I like how the testing in Fedora eventually works its way into my Rocky installs :-)

The OS from IBM

[Revek]

No thanks.

Re:

[martin-boundary]

Also focus-follows-mouse. Why should I waste my life away clicking redundantly on tiny little windows just so they know I'm going to fill in one of their text boxes?

Re:

[gweihir]

Seriously? Gnome does not give you a choice of focus-follows-mouse? What backward defective wannabe-level crap is that piece of software? Now I will look even less at it than I had planned (which was "never").

Any sane Window-Manager just gives you a choice. My fvwm has now been configured for focus-follows-mouse for something like 35 years and I had one (!) easy configuration change in all that time when fvwm2 came out. And that is it. This thing needs to work as I want it to and do so long term. Nothing el

Re:

[bemymonkey]

Of course it gives you that option. Just activate it in Gnome Tweaks. You have the choice between:

Click to Focus
Focus on Hover
Focus Follows Mouse

Re:

[drinkypoo]

So just install the non-default tweaks tool to get access to the hidden setting?

GNOME has made it abundantly clear that their system is for idiots confused by configuration options.

Re:

[bemymonkey]

Tweaks is installed by default even on the very conservative Debian.

You can probably also use gsettings or dconf editor - it's not hidden, just not exposed to end users... as someone who recommends Gnome based distros to friends and family, I'm pretty happy with the fact that my 86 year old father won't accidentally activate focus-follows-mouse and then call me to tell me his mouse is broken and/or cursed.

Re:

[gweihir]

Good to know. I have little respect for the Gnome design overall and for most of the decisions of the Gnome engineering team, but at least they are not totally incompetent.

Re:wayland only != good/better/best

[karmawarrior]

What pisses me off is that the entire justification for wasting 15 years to develop a "replacement" for X11 ended up being obsoleted by technologies that could easily have been foreseen in 2010. cgroups in Linux means every application can be given its own authentication token for the X server, allowing X clients to be given application-by-application security. No need to send everything to everything any more. And full backward compatibility is possible. All that's needed is for the Xorg team to implement the protocol. ...which they won't do because it'd be admitting that the entire last 15 years producing a slower, less efficient, display system with fewer features and some really boneheaded limitations, and making the rest of the community write awkward kludge-ridden desktops around it was a complete waste of time and money that could have been spent on (1) the three months needed to implement security and (2) fixing bugs and bringing other improvements to Xorg.

What an utter shit show.

Re:

[keltor]

Well, I guess you could start working on that, I'm sure X org and MATE would love to have you.

Re:

[bjoast]

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

You've provided no evidence of that, or that you have any idea about anything.

The Wayland devs said X11 was unmaintainable so it didn't make sense to keep working on it, and created an inferior system which is unreliable, has performance that is about on the same level at best, and doesn't work well with the dominant GPU vendor's equipment, and it did in fact take them fifteen years to get here. So which thing do you disagree with?

"Innovation"

[peterww]

RedHat's "contributions" over the last 20 years: Making XFS the default rather than ext4, removing Btrfs, introducing Systemd, PulseAudio, PipeWire, DBus, Wayland, Podman, corporate telemetry reporting, dropping 32-bit and fbcon. Aka, all the annoying shit we don't like that makes Linux into an incompatible, monolithic, "opinionated", corporatized operating system. And let's not forget how they closed their source code.

Well before IBM acquired them, RedHat has been slowly corrupting and subverting the entire Linux ecosystem to serve its own corporate interests. Because they're the largest player, they effectively force everyone else to follow suit, or face not being compatible.

Re:

[Narcocide]

I think you're going to get your way, but it's going to be the undoing of yourself and your employer.

Re: "Innovation"

[strawspulled]

Which open source code has been discontinued?

Re:

[Narcocide]

Spoken like someone with a conflict of interest and a strong delusion about how much public good will their employer has left to burn through before becoming themselves irrelevant.

Re:

[nicubunu]

In reality, users moved away from Fedora based distros and now Ubuntu based distros (Ubuntu and Mint) have the best chance to become that mainstream default

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Making Linux coalesce into a distro that will be the mainstream default and end overall fragmentation.

HAHahAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH

Redhate is doing everything they can to PREVENT that. Consequently, they've had to do fairly sizable layoffs. The news is also that they are going to get more deeply pulled into the world of IBM (with even less independence) in 2026. That's going to chase off even more people who like Redhat but not IBM. IBM is regarded as an idiot's choice everywhere but government, which cannot hire the best people due to lack of funding.

The Past Year

[SlashbotAgent]

I've spent the past year zeroing in on Debian.

I use several distros both professionally and personally. SUSE, Rocky, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse...

Each is it's own fragmented fork down various roads I don't care to travel.

I had been leaning towards Ubuntu and LTSC as The one. But Ubuntu has been making increasingly poor decisions lately. It also seems so much more logical to support the upstream, Debian, than the Ubuntu fork.

Debian 13(Trixie) is out now. It seems just fine and I hope that it will streamline an

I like Fedora

[xack]

It's rough around the edges but still user friendly, i'd rather deal with a few papercuts like driver issues and codec licences than deal with Windows 11's shit. Fedora is easier to install, you just insert the usb drive, boot, select partition, enter username password, timezone and keyboard layout and that's it. No messing around with creating Microsoft Accounts and dealing with the constant barrage of dark patterns. Just boycott anti-cheat games and enjoy the penguin experience.