F42 betas are here and some new additions

Aurora
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Hi all,

This is just quick informative one regarding F42 betas and some future stuff.

You can read Jorge’s post which covers lot of stuff and no need to repeat them here.

F42 based Aurora

We have today enabled Fedora 42 based betas of Aurora images, so come and consume. Just to note that there are still missing pieces (like some akmods etc) but things will improve over time once we near the looming launch of Fedora 42.

If you want to test these images, rebasing is easy. It is recommended to pin your latest working installation before you do so.

Pin your latest deployment:

sudo ostree admin pin 0

Then rebase to Aurora Beta:

sudo bootc switch --enforce-container-sigpolicy ghcr.io/ublue-os/aurora:beta

replace the aurora:beta part with the image you want (f.ex aurora-dx:beta).

April

  • When F42 comes out aurora:latest will move to it right away
  • aurora:stable will move to F42 based images about a week or two after that. (We’ll announce it here)

Those are the near-future things looming.

You can read more on the project releated stuff from the linked post by Jorge.

General things

We haven’t really posted anything general before but in the future we will be doing more of these kind of posts and also general what is happening / how is it going types of things.

Guess the “biggest” thing was shifting Aurora to its own image. At the same time our team got joined by new maintainers (me, ledif and Vish).

Also bluefin and aurora have been working on a Live ISOs and also a new installer. Which leads me to the next thing…

One More Thing…

As Jorge teased, imbev has also been working on something fresh:

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image1920×1233 160 KB

Bluefin already paved the road on their side on this and now its Auroras turn. Let me introduce Aurora Helium LTS.

Aurora Helium LTS is built on the same CentOS foundation as Bluefin LTS. It’s basically Aurora built on CentOS instead of Fedora, but with the same user experience.

How to get it

Snag the ISO from here and follow the instructions. As this is fresh, we recommend testing this on a VM (unless you are a real madlad).

This new ISO is also a testing ground for our Live ISO and our (currently pretty barebones) installer.

Issues can be posted on the Aurora-LTS repo in Github.

Until next time!

So with that, enjoy our F42 betas and the new LTS version. And see you next time!

11 Likes
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Exciting news! And the lts has arm support?

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Nice! Though, by the lack of mention, I’d assume the Live ISOs for Aurora isn’t here yet and will take more time to implement?

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Yes it also has arm support. Niklas tested it with M3 Mac in UTM.

If you mean the “normal” ISOs, yes they are not yet armed with the new Live capabilities and installer. Can’t really say a timeline when we could use it on the normal images but the development has been pretty smooth and fast, so we will see :slight_smile:

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I wonder if this (or bluefin lts arm) works on snapdragon x laptops?

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Try it if you can. Theoretically it does.

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I would like to hear what the maintainers think about the GTS editions now? (There isn’t one for Aurora AFAIK.)

Bluefin has a GTS (for now at least). Is the plan to continue providing that and maybe add an Aurora GTS too one day..? Or do the new CentOS Stream based LTS editions make GTS less appealing going forward..?

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This is just my personal opinion, and not to be taken as “auroras opinion” :slight_smile:

I personally don’t see the need for the GTS edition at this point. Of course we could after F42 hits, start producing a GTS variant which would be based on F41. But as KDE is currently using a “rolling release” model where patches and versions are released on fedora as soon as they are made public, the gts would fall behind and be left on the older KDE release.

And as the KDE people have stated, the bugfixes that older KDE release gets are little inconsistent and not fully maintained by the core developers it might just produce a very much different and worse experience.

If and when (maybe next year) KDE moves to a more Gnome like release schedule (which they are planning but decided not to do this year) it might be more feasible.

7 Likes
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GTS is useful if user prefer kernel and base core packages to be older than stable. Could we have a GTS version with the latest rolling KDE but with other packages matching the N-1 fedora version?

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Kernel would be the same version as stable.

KDE SIG are allowed to push updates to plasma during a release. So F41 and F42 will have the same version of plasma. Meanwhile on gnome, Fedora will not update gnome on older releases

Unless you want an older mesa (which I think will still be updated due to using negativio17), systemd, pipewire, and maybe podman… You’re not getting that different of an experience between stable and gts.

2 Likes
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I hadn’t realised that the KDE packages on Fedora are handled differently than GNOME - so thank you for highlighting that. I agree then that unlike with GNOME, the KDE UX is unlikely to be different between Fedora releases.

There are however significant foundational changes or upgrades in the Fedora base between releases (just skim Fedora Changes). I like that the GTS edition lets me not be an early adopter of those. On GTS we get to adopt those foundational changes after they’ve been tested for 6 months and niggles have been resolved (those niggles aren’t necessarily in Fedora itself, but 3rd party software that may not be compatible yet). For me GTS provides a fairly modern Linux OS - more modern than a typical LTS, but not quite as modern as the latest Fedora - which is perfect for me.

Anyway - I have no particular skin in the game for Aurora GTS, since I’m using Bluefin. I was just curious.. Thanks for the info.

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I installed Aurora-LTS, the installer didn’t ask me to create a user, then during login it is expecting a username and password. Tried liveuser and centos but neither worked.

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The installer is currently being prepared and we are now using another one for the new live isos. We will update them shortly once the new installer is ready.