Aurora goes Fedora 42

Aurora 42 goes live!

Hello stargazers, we have some exciting news to bring to you today.

We are releasing Aurora 42 into the wild for all people who rock the :latest tag for their installed Aurora.

People who are on the normal stable branch will continue to rock Fedora 41 until we let it loose to your machines. Expect this in the next ~2 weeks until things have settled.

You won’t notice a big difference going from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42 since KDE is on Version 6.3 on both of those releases, you just get an updated kernel and other system packages.

The release trains currently look like this:

stable or stable-daily latest
Fedora Version: 41 42
KDE Version: 6.3.4 6.3.4
Target User: Most users Advanced users
System Updates: Weekly or Daily Daily
Application Updates: Twice a Day Twice a Day
Kernel: Gated (using the Fedora CoreOS Kernel) Ungated (stock Fedora Kernel)

Let’s go from top to bottom, giving spotlight to each change.

New wallpaper

As some of you may have seen, we have a new wallpaper. It’s a beautiful night scene set a mountaineous lake, with two people stargazing and sitting beside the lake. Let’s see if you can spot the flying Helium backpack.

New website & updated docs

You may have noticed that we updated the website not a long time ago. It is redesigned and revamped from the ground up, to enable a fresh, modern and better UI. Catch the star trails on the Hero section and scroll through the different sections which are totally different now. It was also updated to modern NextJS 15 and has a much more refined codebase. It better highlights the documentation and gives you links to go everywhere, including this forum and the documentation.

Speaking of documentation, we updated that too. It now includes docs on how to use ramlama which we ship on the Developer Experience and is in general much more refined.
Thank you @nicknamenamenick for helping out with this!

Check them out here:

Aurora Docs

Give us feedback on how you like these changes and if you want to write some new guides or contribute fixes to the documentation, you will find the repo here: Aurora Docs Repo

Increasing the flatpak army of applications

To decrease our reliance on self-built rpm packages and use containerized and modern application delivery methods, we are replacing several desktop apps with their counterparts in a Flatpak.

This means that the following applications have been removed from the base image and our delivered through flatpak:

  • Devpod
  • Skanpage
  • InputLeap (which was already removed in the Aurora 41 cycle)

To pull in all of the new flatpaks, run ujust install-system-flatpaks to pull in the new default set of applications.

Aurora Helium LTS

What you might have heard already, we are also cooking up Aurora but built from a CentOS Stream 10 base. @imbev is hard at work crafting this edition of Aurora and making it as awesome as it can be. We are currently in the alpha-stage. It is pretty barebones right now. More news to share soon!

We have created a doc page for the new LTS Edition here: Aurora Helium LTS Doc-Page

Thanks

I want to take this moment to thank all of the Aurora maintainers, including @inffy, @imbev, @ledif, @RealVishy and @renner who made our branding package modular and decoupled it from the main repo.

That’s it for now!

Happy stargazing
~ Niklas

19 Likes

Great work, everyone. I updated my custom build (thanks, BlueBuild!) to use “latest” (was on stable), waited for the GitHub action to finish the build, ran ujust update, and everything just works. I switched to Aurora a couple of weeks ago, to my own build a couple of days ago, and the whole experience has been fantastic.

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Love the look of the new website to go with the redesigned logo. Aurora’s been great, keep up the great work, guys.

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Just a small heads up. We will be dropping the legacy nvidia ISOs.

We will still keep building the images so current users of -nvidia images wont be affected. Only the installation ISOs are not built anymore.

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So if I’m running -nvidia images can I rebase to the regular one? I’m using aurora-dx-nvidia:latest.

You dont need to rebase. We will keep building the nvidia images. We will not just build the ISO installers.

So you can still get the nvidia drivers (as long as nvidia keeps supporting them).

I’m on an old aurora-nvidia installation. How must I proceed if I want to rebase to the open drivers?

If you have a newer card that has support in the open drivers its easy.

for example if you are currently on aurora-nvidia:stable (you can check your image with rpm-ostree status

sudo bootc switch --enforce-container-sigpolicy ghcr.io/ublue-os/aurora-nvidia-open:stable

so basically just add the -open to your current image address.

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How can you check if the open drivers support a particular model? I have a Quadro M2000 but in my case use aurora-dx.

Everything that has Turing Architecture or newer (RTX 2000, GTX 1650, 1660 etc) is supported by NVIDIA-Open.

Supported cards can be found from their github

So basically you need a Turing architecture or newer to have support in the -open drivers. M2000 looks like a Maxwell card that is not supported.

Yes after posting I discovered that as well and apparently I have to stick with the proprietary drivers. I saw mention that the Nvidia drivers were being integrated into the main image, does that include the proprietary ones and/or open source ones? I’m trying to figure out if I can move to the main aurora-dx image or have to stick with aurora-dx-nvidia?

That is only a change in the build process, nothing changes for you.