Fedora 40 Upgrade and Cosmic Install

Fedora 40 Upgrade

Today, I made the decision to finally update my laptop from Fedora 39 to F40. This comes as I want to try the new Cosmic desktop beta, which released last week. Fedora 40 has been out for months now, and I just haven’t used this laptop for a long while. Yes, not the best idea, but it has still worked for this long a time without updating so just goes to show how stable Fedora is.

The update process is rather simple.

First, you have to make sure that Fedora is fully up-to-date on the current version. My method below uses the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade which can be installed as you would install any other package.

sudo dnf update --refresh

Next, once the update is done, you can run the upgrade command itself.

Note

Changing the number at the end of this command will install the version of Fedora that you want.

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40

Then simply follow the steps in the installer and then it will prompt you to reboot. Then once, the upgrade reboot is done, you have got the new version of Fedora installed.

Cosmic Beta Install

Note

I have had to reinstall Fedora 40 fresh after I somehow corrupted or something my install. I have since switched to Debian 12 as F40 kept crashing at installing bootloader.

I also wanted to give the new Cosmic DE a try, and decided on using my Fedora laptop, hence the upgrade (which I am having problems with it not having actually upgraded.) The Fedora package for Cosmic’s beta is in a COPR repo.

My only experience with using Cosmic has been an alright one. I gave a little try on PopOS 24.04 LTS live environment which comes with Cosmic but I didn’t stick around long because I was trying to install. From what I saw it ran quite smoothly (even on my old machine), although it is missing some features, espetially in Settings.

Warning

I do not recommend using this as a daily driver as it is not a full desktop experience just yet.