Fedora 42 has the Answer, but Ubuntu's Plucky Puffin isn't far behind

Watch your partitions – GPT and dual-boot don't always mix

While The Reg FOSS desk was on spring break, both the latest interim Ubuntu and latest Fedora debuted.

Which came first, the seabird or Deep Thought's Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, in this case, the Answer came first. Fedora Linux 42 was announced on April 15, while Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" followed a couple of days later on April 17.

Fedora's announcement contains plentiful references to Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's a long association between Linux releases and the Ultimate Answer. For instance, Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" was released on 10/10/10 as a nod to the Guide, which was because 42 in decimal is 101010 in binary. The London launch party for "Maverick" was colocated with the annual general meeting of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Guide appreciation society. (This was, incidentally, five years after The Reg FOSS desk was president of ZZ9.) Five years after Ubuntu 10.10, openSUSE 42.1 was also such a tribute. We enjoyed seeing Fedora catch up. Its default wallpaper has "6 x 9 = 42" carved into a tree. In base 13, you see, six multiplied by nine is 42.

Regular Reg readers will face no unpleasant surprises, nor lynch mobs unsatisfied with enigmatic answers resulting from seven and a half million years of deep thought (or even Deep Thought). We looked at the Fedora 42 beta in late March and the Ubuntu 25.04 beta earlier this month.

All flavors of Ubuntu include APT 3, with fancy new columnal color output – click to enlarge

Both are based on kernel 6.14, and the default desktop version of both uses GNOME 48. It's an odd-numbered year and that means this is an interim release of Ubuntu, so it only gets support for nine months, after which you will have to upgrade to 25.10. Fedora 42 will be supported for a year, and you can skip a version when upgrading, so you could put it off until Fedora 44 in a year's time.

As usual, both come in multiple different editions, and both offer most of the big-name desktops: KDE, LXDE, Cinnamon, Budgie, MATE, and Xfce. Ubuntu calls these flavors, and in addition to these multi-distro desktops, it also offers a Chinese-centric Kylin edition with the UKUI desktop plus its own former flagship Unity desktop.

Fedora 42 Workstation featuring the new, linear, four-step installer – click to enlarge

Fedora calls editions with alternative desktops spins, and offers all the main ones listed above – so not Unity or Kylin – but in addition it also offers three tiling environments (i3 for X11, Sway for Wayland, and Miracle for Mir), plus the obsolescent LXDE, and System 76's still-experimental COSMIC desktop. For touchscreen devices, there's a spin with KDE Plasma Mobile too. The latter is additionally available on some Arm64 hardware, although not for any mainstream tablets. And there's a live-bootable USB key with the Sugar educational environment for kids from the One Laptop Per Child project.

Fedora also offers non-desktop editions, including Server, Cloud, CoreOS, and IoT, plus five immutable variants. As such, Fedora wins on breadth of choice, even if we count Ubuntu's special-purpose flavors Edubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Server, all of which get Plucky versions too.

Both distros get new and improved driver support, and the new version of GNOME has triple-buffering support and other improvements for better performance on low-end hardware.

Fedora defaults to Btrfs – with compression, but that's all. Having home in a subvolume doesn't protect it – click to enlarge

As we said of the beta, Ubuntu has improved the installer, notably in accessibility support, and it now supports dual-booting with a Bitlocker-encrypted copy of Windows. This version of Ubuntu includes version 3 of the APT package manager. There's also a unified Arm64 image, which supports Arm virtual machines plus various Arm-based computers, including Copilot+ PCs. The ISO file is still huge, though. At over 6 GB, it hasn't shrunk much since the beta. A default install took 9.7 GB of disk and used 1.1 GB of RAM at idle.

Fedora has a whole new installer, but for now you'll only find it in the GNOME-based Workstation. At long last, it abandons Anaconda's innovative – but illogical – "hub-and-spoke" approach, and replaces it with a more standard sequential installation process, with four main steps. It's a significant improvement, and we hope all the spins acquire it in Fedora 43.

Fedora is now officially available on Microsoft WSL, so you can run Fedora 42 under Windows if you're not yet ready to let go of that comforting Microsoft safety blanket. The Orca screenreader now works under Wayland, a definite accessibility win. Fedora's KDE Plasma spin has now been promoted to a full edition, achieving parity with the GNOME variant – but that doesn't mean that it's caught up in all regards yet. Website links to Fedora Workstation take you direct to GNOME with no mention of KDE, and the Fedora KDE edition still uses the old installer. Both are Wayland-only by default.

Fedora Workstation includes GNOME Classic, a more traditional replacement for GNOME Shell – click to enlarge

One change we're less keen on is that Fedora now defaults to partitioning all non-removable drives using GPT, even on computers with traditional BIOS firmware.

On the one hand, GPT is more modern and flexible. For instance, it handles drives over 2 TB in size and eliminates the ancient MS-DOS 3-era distinction between "primary" versus "secondary" partitions. But it also brings snags.

GPT came along decades after BIOS firmware, and the OS must jump through some hoops to boot from GPT on a computer with pre-UEFI firmware. For example, Linux needs a small additional "BIOS boot" partition alongside other disk volumes. Linux can't dual-boot with Windows from GPT on BIOS, Windows on BIOS only supports the older MBR partitioning scheme. (Or, to phrase that the other way round, Windows will only boot from GPT on machines with UEFI firmware.) So this Fedora decision will hinder dual-booting. We tried to get around it with custom partitioning to no avail – but then, Fedora has lagged behind most other distros both in advanced partitioning and in dual-boot support for well over a decade. It just got worse, but the Red Hat-backed distro's maintainers don't appear to see this as a priority.

As ever, the two biggest names in desktop Linux put out new versions at about the same time, based on much the same core components, and consequently with comparable improvements in hardware support, functionality, and performance. Notably, both have improved installers.

In terms of the differences, Fedora offers many more variants and editions – but for now, only the GNOME Workstation has the new installer. Ubuntu has improved its dual-boot support, and it's significantly more flexible in how it can share a machine with Windows. Conversely, Fedora's aggressive modernization means it's less compatible than before in this regard, especially on older PCs.

If you want the OS to share the computer with other OSes and distros, or you have hardware that needs proprietary drivers, then as always, Ubuntu has the edge. It also boasts some richer and more capable desktops. If you prefer stripped-down minimalist tiling environments and don't care about full desktops, and if you care less about dual-boot, older hardware, or proprietary drivers, then Fedora offers more choices. ®