First Look at Fedora 43

Fedora 43 dropped yesterday, October 28, right on schedule. It’s nice to know that I can count on version upgrades every 6 months in April and October as they have been for 21 years now.

Upgrading my primary workstation

Within minutes of F43 becoming available on the Fedora Project home page, I started the version upgrade on my primary workstation. A version upgrade differs from installing patches and fixes. A version upgrade is a major upgrade from one version of Fedora to another; in this case upgrading from Fedora 42 to Fedora 43.

The upgrade itself was smooth and easy. I use a script that performs all of the steps required so that I can start it and not need to intervene further by entering the next commands.

It first installs all updates for the currently installed release, then it downloads the files required to perform the upgrade. With that done, it reboots the system and performs the upgrade itself while off-line. When finished, it reboots into the new release of Fedora, in this case, 43.

Initial impressions

My initial impression of Fedora 43 with the Xfce desktop is — well, nothing’s changed. It’s a bit underwhelming to find no visible changes, but I think that’s just as it should be. All my icons and program launchers are right where I left them. Everything works as I expect it to.

Because these upgrades don’t muck around with my system settings and preferences.

The same is true of my laptop on which I use KDE Plasma; there are no visible changes except that some things are a bit smoother. And if I were using the default Fedora background wallpaper, that would have changed.

Some of the changes

However, there are a few notable user visible changes in this release. For those of you installing fresh Fedora Linux 43 Spins, you may be greeted with the new Anaconda WebUI. This was the default installer interface for Fedora Workstation 42, and now it’s the default installer UI for the Spins as well. You’ll only see this when performing a new install rather than an upgrade.

GNOME desktop users will notice that the GNOME is now Wayland-only in Fedora Linux 43. GNOME upstream has deprecated X11 support, and has disabled it as a compile time default in GNOME 49. Upstream GNOME plans to fully remove X11 support in GNOME 50.

Despite the fact that little has changed on the surface, there are several important changes underneath. But none of those changes directly affect the user experience, so I won’t go into them here.

Upgrading the rest of my systems

This was actually quite boring. I ran my script on each of my internal systems and waited for them to reboot. I did a quick check to ensure they were all running as expected. They all are, including my 20-year old Dell.

The upgrades to my firewall/router and the server for Both.org went just as well and so my entire fleet was upgraded to Fedora 43 in one day. With no problems or even minor glitches at all.

Yawn!

How to perform a Fedora upgrade

You can find step-by-step instructions for performing Fedora version upgrades in my article, How to upgrade your Fedora Linux system to the latest release with DNF system-upgrade, including how to prepare for the upgrade and some follow-up tasks you should perform. It also covers how to upgrade from a multilevel previous release, such as from F36 to F43. There’s also a link to my upgrade script.

On my varied systems, the upgrades take from 40 minutes to about an hour each. There are also times when it looks like nothing is happening, but be patient. The upgrade will complete by rebooting into the newest release of Fedora.