Skip to main content

Upgrading from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42

If someone were to ask me which Linux distro has provided the best desktop experience, I wouldn't hesitate to answer: Fedora Workstation 41. Seriously, Fedora 41 has been a real pleasure to use - it's been as close to perfect as I could have hoped for.

That said, I think it’s understandable that I felt a bit nervous or cautious about upgrading to Fedora 42. These nervy feelings were intensified by the fact that I'm currently in the middle of working on a large project and I cannot afford any downtime to fix any system issues caused by a borked upgrade.

I did it anyway.

Thankfully, as with the upgrade from 40 to 41, the process was straightforward and trouble free, as I mentioned in a status update:

Daily driver (Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 3) upgraded to Fedora 42. No issues to speak of. I love that I can do a release upgrade and then just get on with my day. Perfect.

The upgrade process

The upgrade process is fairly straightforward and when performed via a terminal, it consists of 3 commands.

Step 1 - Update system and reboot

Issue the following command:

sudo dnf --refresh upgrade && sudo reboot

Step 2 - Fetch packages for new release

Issue the following command:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=42

Step 3 - Reboot and install the new packages

Issue the command:

sudo dnf5 offline reboot

Done.
I'm hoping Fedora 42 proves to be as good as its predecessor.

View as: JSON Markdown

If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, you can subscribe to my RSS feed.

Similar posts

  1. My Z shell setup

    A quick walkthrough of my Z shell setup for Debian servers and macOS, including Pure prompt, autosuggestions, history search, npm completion, SSH host completion, aliases, and a few cross-platform helper commands.

    zsh linux macos fish
  2. How to install PHP extension for Microsoft SQL Server under Fedora

    I found myself needing to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server via a PHP application running under Fedora. Finding concise details about installing the necessary drivers and extensions was not easy, so here is a blog post detailing how I did it.

    php microsoft fedora mssql sql linux
  3. GNOME menu entries for Visual Studio Code projects

    I work on a large number of code projects and I wanted a quick way to open any of my projects in Visual Studio Code, my preferred code editor. I figured the quickest way to do this under GNOME would be to create a .desktop file for each project directory.

    gnome vscode linux
  4. How to set-up WatchGuard VPN with IKEv2 under Debian and Fedora

    A blog post detailing how to set-up WatchGuard VPN with IKEv2 under both Debian and Fedora Linux. This guide works for me under Debian 12 (bookworm) and Fedora 40/41, but your mileage may vary depending on how your VPN service is configured.

    debian vpn watchguard ikev2 fedora ipsec
  5. My Debian 12 (bookworm) server set-up

    I've been running Debian on my servers for years. It's dependable. I guess my server set-up is pretty common, consisting of Apache, PHP and MariaDB, but I figure it is still worth sharing details of how I provision my servers.

    php composer mariadb apache debian linux node fish
  6. My Debian 12 (bookworm) desktop set-up

    Creating a good Debian desktop experience is not too difficult, thanks to the excellent work of the Debian developers, but I thought it might be interesting to share how I set-up my Debian systems.

    debian linux
  7. Upgrading from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41

    A post describing my first experience of upgrading a Fedora installation. TLDR: The upgrade went smoothly and Fedora continues to impress me.

    fedora linux
  8. Desktop Linux and compiling from source

    If anyone is in any doubt as to whether you need to compile any software from source in order to use desktop Linux, you really don't.

    linux
  9. Switching desktop Linux from Debian to Fedora

    Last week I switched the operating system on my daily driver (Lenovo ThinkPad T14s) from Debian 12 to Fedora 40. In this post I write a little about why I switched and how the switch went.

    debian linux fedora
  10. How to create Bash aliases in Fedora

    Creating your own Bash aliases is a relatively easy process. That said, I recently switched my desktop linux distribution from Debian to Fedora and there are subtle differences.

    linux fedora debian bash
  11. How to set-up a crontab file

    In Linux, Cron is a daemon/service that executes shell commands periodically on a given schedule. Cron is driven by a crontab, a configuration file that holds details of what commands are to be run along with a timetable of when to run them. Knowing how to use Cron is key to mastering automation with Linux.

    cron automation linux