Upgrading from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41

Today I upgraded two systems from Fedora 40 to Fedora 41. This was the first time I've performed an upgrade from one Fedora release to the next, since switching from Debian to Fedora. I've previously done many Debian upgrades and they always went smoothly, but I wasn't quite sure what to expect with a Fedora upgrade.

The process itself was very straight forward. To begin with, I had to make sure my system was fully up-to-date. This was achieved with the following command:

sudo dnf --refresh upgrade

Next, I had to issue the following command to download the Fedora 41 packages:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=41

Once the packages had downloaded, I ran the final upgrade command to reboot and install the new packages:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

With that, my system rebooted and installed the new packages, before rebooting again and presenting the GDM login screen. The whole process took about 20-30 minutes.

As mentioned, I upgraded two systems with the first being a laptop that I use for testing production code, a Razer Blade 15. This device has always been slightly problematic due to its hybrid NVIDIA graphics and after the upgrade it experienced an issue whereby certain applications wouldn't load under Wayland. A quick search found other Fedora users with the same issue and someone had provided a fix, which I implemented.

The second device was my daily driver, a ThinkPad T14s. I was slightly more nervous about upgrading this system as I use it for work and it has all my build tools and development environments on it. I made sure to perform a backup of the system before performing the upgrade, but I needn't have bothered as the upgrade went smoothly. The only issue I experienced was one GNOME extension not being compatible with GNOME 47, but that was not really linked to the Fedora upgrade process.

My first experience of upgrading Fedora to the next release was very good and on par with my previous experiences of upgrading Debian releases. Fedora continues to impress me and I'm happy I decided to make the switch from Debian.

UPDATE 2024-10-30: I submitted a pull request for the GNOME extension that wasn't compatible with GNOME 47 and it has been merged. The updated extension is now live on extensions.gnome.org.

UPDATE 2024-11-05: The Wayland/NVIDIA/Hybrid GPU issue I experienced with my Razer Blade 15 has been fixed with updated Fedora packages.