The Fedora 43 beta is now available with several new features and upgrades. One of the key changes is the default use of the Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Spins, creating a consistent and modern installation experience across different desktop variants. The Anaconda installer now uses DNF5, which improves support and debugging for package-based applications and is a step towards the deprecation of DNF4.
Fedora Kinoite users will have auto-updates enabled by default, ensuring systems are consistently running the latest bug fixes and features. This puts it on par with Fedora’s immutable distribution that runs GNOME, Fedora Silverblue, which also uses auto-update by default. Kinoite is an immutable system that uses the KDE desktop. Another change in this update is the inclusion of a new default monospace fallback font which ensures consistent and predictable font selection, preventing jarring changes that occurred in past versions.
There are numerous upgrades for core systems and build processes in this beta. The GNU Toolchain has been updated to stay current with the latest features, security fixes, and bug improvements from upstream projects. Package-specific RPM Macros are now available for build flags, offering a cleaner and more consistent method for maintainers to make per-package adjustments. The build process for Fedora CoreOS now uses a standard Containerfile, moving away from a custom tool. This helps to simplify the build process, as anyone with Podman installed can now build Fedora CoreOS.
The beta also brings major language stack updates and new features. Notably, the beta updates the Python stack to Python 3.14 so that critical bugs can be identified and reported before the final release. Golang has also been updated to version 1.25, providing new features like leak detection and the ability to use subdirectories as a module root. The programming language Idris 2 is now included too, giving users access to new features such as Quantitative Type Theory (QTT) for type-safe concurrent programming.
Fedora also announced strategic deprecations for the long-term health of the project. The binutils-gold subpackage is being deprecated to simplify the developer experience by reducing the number of available linkers. The python-nose package will be removed in Fedora 43 when it goes stable to prevent new packages from depending on an unmaintained test runner. Developers are encouraged to move to supported frameworks. Finally, older, unmaintained versions of gtk-rs bindings are also being retired, preventing Fedora from shipping obsolete and potentially insecure software.
The Fedora 43 beta is quite lengthy. According to the current release calendar, Fedora 43 won’t go stable until November 11.