Fedora 41 Offers Zippy Performance
Not even five years ago, if someone said to me that Fedora was a Linux distribution that anyone could use, I would have smirked and pointed them toward Ubuntu, elementary OS, Zorin OS, or Linux Mint. It has long been known as an early test run for Red Hat to test its next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The distro was chock full of great features but still pretty buggy for everyday use.
But a funny thing happened over the last few years: Fedora all of a sudden became a distribution that was viable not only to power users (and those highly familiar with Linux) but for just about everyone. And now that the Fedora team has announced that Fedora KDE will soon serve at the same level as the Workstation edition, I can honestly recommend it to anyone, regardless of experience.
Some will think me crazy, but I stand by the sentiment that I’ve held since Fedora 39. But version 41 makes 39 look slow by comparison. And with Fedora 42 slated to be released 2025-04-15, there’s still plenty of time to enjoy version 41, and I’m here to tell you it is worth it.
What Makes Fedora 41 so Special?
Let’s kick this off by looking at the obvious. Fedora 41 ships with the GNOME 47 desktop interface, which includes plenty of polish to one of the most popular Linux desktops on the market. GNOME 47 includes features like custom accent colors, hardware encoding for screencasts, a new build option for Wayland, improved performance, better default applications, and revamped network connection management.
Although you won’t find game-changing features with GNOME 47, the updates, new features, and bug fixes work together to create a highly polished desktop that performs better than any release the GNOME team has ever made available.
But, as I said, if you don’t like GNOME, you can always try one of the available spins, such as KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE-COMPIZ, i3, LxQT, Lxde, SOAS, Sway, Budgie, Miracle, or KDE Plasma Mobile. For those who prefer GNOME, trust that you’ll be getting a desktop operating system that performs better than many on the market.
It’s Not Just About GNOME
There’s more to Fedora 41 than just the polish made possible by GNOME 47. There’s also a new terminal app, Ptyxis (Figure 1), which includes first-class container support, better Flatpak support, native light/dark modes, a terminal inspector for debugging, and user-customizable keyboard shortcuts.
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Figure 1: The Ptyxis terminal offers more features than the previous default app.
Fedora 41 also includes:
- Several tweaks to the file manager, such as sidebar customizations (Figure 2), an updated file picker, and improved UI.
- Kernel 6.11.7-300.
- Enhances small-screen support.
- Proprietary NVIDIA drivers supported with Secure Boot.
- DNF 5, which is exponentially faster than previous iterations.
- RPM 4.20 with a new declarative build system and enhanced support for file triggers.
- Support for Python 2 has been dropped.
- Plenty of developer updates, such as Golang 1.23, Perl 5.40, LLVM 19, Node.js 22.0, PyTorch 2.4, AMD’s ROCm 6.2, and the latest version of the GNU Toolchain.
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Figure 2: GNOME Files now allows you to easily customize the sidebar by removing bookmarks you don’t need.
The Big Selling Point: Speed
Sure there’s plenty of polish on the GUI, upgraded toolchains, and some shiny new wallpapers. All of that is great but the real deal maker comes by way of performance. Other than a handful of small-footprint, lightweight distributions, Fedora 41 is probably the most performant Linux desktop distribution on the market.
Seriously… Fedora 41 is fast. I remember the first time I tested the release and was utterly blown away by the speed. Yes, this is a combination of several factors (such as GNOME 47 and kernel 6.11), but all of the work the developers have put into this release has paid off with a level of performance I’ve not seen in other Linux distributions.
One of my biggest complaints with Fedora for such a long time was about anything having to do with DNF package manager. It was painfully slow. Sometimes it seemed I could run a full distribution upgrade on Ubuntu faster than a standard update on Fedora.
DNF 5 solves that problem.
I can already hear you proclaim that DNF 5 was available for Fedora 39. Although Fedora 39 didn’t ship with DNF 5 pre-installed, it wasn’t all that hard to upgrade the package manager. Nor did DNF officially ship with Fedora 40. Fedora 41 finally sees DNF5 in action by default.
DNF 5 reduces the Fedora installation footprint by 60%, eliminates metadata redundancy, allows faster package inquiries and downloads, and offers a unified experience across servers, workstations, and containers for more consistent behavior.
With DNF 5 having reached a certain level of maturity and the combination of the latest GNOME, a bright and shiny kernel, and all of the other under and over-the-hood tweaks, Fedora 41 is so fast it will leave scorch marks on your desk.
Okay, that might be a bit of hyperbole there, but, again, I stand by the statement. Fedora is fast. Applications open almost immediately, install quickly, and run smoothly.
Finally, Fedora 41 has finally removed GNOME X11 packages from the default media. Those packages are still available in Fedora’s repositories, so they can be installed if necessary. Wayland is much faster and more secure than X11, so it adds to the speed.
If I’ve piqued your interest in Fedora 41, you can download an ISO of the workstation edition from the official download page. And remember, if the GNOME desktop isn’t your jam, you can download and install one of the many official spins.
