Today was Fedora 40 Upgrade Day for my desktop PC, Cerberus / Phobos. Doesn't feel like it's been long at all since Fedora 39 released last year, honestly. But now it's here and it's ready, so I thought I should finally upgrade.

I deliberately waited until a specific company released a F40 package of their program so I wouldn't have any issues post-upgrade. Well, I did have issues, but I'l get to that in a moment.

upgrade process

I've been using KDE Plasma 5 for a little bit as GNOME was breaking again (surprise surprise) so I opened Discover and tried to download Fedora 40, though it seemed to stall. I'm not quite sure why, probably something to do with PackageKit. I went the way I usually go instead, which is using DNF's system upgrade plugin. I made sure I was up to date in F39, ran the command and let everything download. Because I'm crazy and have three desktop environments installed (GNOME, Plasma and Cinnamon) it took 5GB and about 20 minutes to download. Imported GPG keys, transaction test finished without issues. I then issued the command to reboot and begin the upgrade.

That itself took 15-20 minutes. To be expected, as it was upgrading 3,476 RPM packages. I went to go make a cup of tea and sort out some stuff around the house while DNF was churning away. I came back to it almost complete and it, expectedly, rebooted back into the F39 version of kernel 6.8.8.

Fedora ships by default with Grub as the bootloader (the thing that lets you choose an OS after your BIOS finishes its job) but I had removed it and switched it out for rEFInd for a nicer looking bootloader... experience? I guess? Anyway, that in itself means new kernels no longer auto-copy from /usr/lib/modules to the boot partition, meaning I have to copy them manually. I expected this, so I found the F40 version of 6.8.8 (that version number sucks by the way, give me 6.8.9 to get rid of it please maintainers) and copied it to the boot partition, then rebooted.

Things immediately went wrong.

rEFInd hung while booting the new kernel, and it wasn't immediately apparent at first what had gone wrong. I poked around in the boot partition and found that an initramfs and the symvers archive for that specific version of the kernel were missing - if the names of the files don't match for the specific kernel version, rEFInd hangs. The initramfs is the Initial RAM Filesystem, where the kernel unpacks itself into before loading everything else. Without an initramfs image, it's stuck. Not sure on the symvers, but that should've been there too. The fix was to boot back into the F39 kernel and re-run DNF to reinstall the kernel packages. This successfully generated the initramfs and symvers as expected. Rebooting, rEFInd successfully booted into the F40 kernel, and all was now well on that front.

I've no idea why DNF has such a freakish reliance on Grub for making sure the kernel gets copied to the boot partition, but that the system upgrade plugin no longer generates an initramfs and copies symvers there because Grub is not present is even more concerning.

Plasma 6 and the new (?) SDDM

Because I'm using Plasma I cannot comment on GNOME 46, but I imagine it's extremely similar to GNOME 45.

Plasma 6 feels like a nice refresh to Plasma 5. Not too much has changed for my usage, but one thing I do like is the floating taskbar which transitions to the regular Plasma 5 style one when a window snaps or is maximised. There's some quality of life improvements, such as System Settings getting its menus reordered, and Discover also got an update.

I've not encountered bugs yet, but there are bound to be many. Plasma 6 is very very early in its release cycle - it's only at version 6.0.4, not even 6.1. Bugs are to be expected. Plasma 5 had a history of bugginess on Fedora (at least under Wayland), and to see that Plasma 6 under Wayland is working pretty well has surprised and impressed me.

SDDM, however, was broken immediately after I rebooted. Clearly some under-the-hood changes had occurred which broke the old Dracula SDDM theme I had, so I had to go and install the Plasma 6 variant. It's worth noting I had to apply it twice to get it to work - this is an odd issue that has most definitely carried over from Plasma 5 and the old SDDM. Otherwise, it behaves the same to me.

Fedora 40's working very well and I've not seen any real issues yet for daily usage. However, that bodged system upgrade pissed me off. I understand that Fedora's maintainers have only so much time and attention they can devote to keeping it going, but to have an unbootable system with the latest kernel in rEFInd after I copied it because DNF failed to tell Dracut to generate an initramfs is to me a fatal mistake. Not everyone uses rEFInd, this is true - but seriously, it's a problem.

I don't want to have these shenanigans repeated when Fedora 41 comes out later this year.