Announcing the release of Fedora 32 Beta

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 32 Beta, the next step towards our planned Fedora 32 release at the end of April.

Download the prerelease from our Get Fedora site:

Or, check out one of our popular variants, including KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other desktop environments, as well as images for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3:

Beta Release Highlights

Fedora Workstation

New in Fedora 32 Workstation Beta is EarlyOOM enabled by default. EarlyOOM enables users to more quickly recover and regain control over their system in low-memory situations with heavy swap usage. Fedora 32 Workstation Beta also enables the fs.trim timer by default, which improves performance and wear leveling for solid state drives.

Fedora 32 Workstation Beta includes GNOME 3.36, the newest release of the GNOME desktop environment. It is full of performance enhancements and improvements. GNOME 3.36 adds a Do Not Disturb button in the notifications, improved setup for parental controls and virtualization, and tweaks to Settings. For a full list of GNOME 3.36 highlights, see the release notes.

Other updates

Fedora 32 Beta includes updated versions of many popular packages like Ruby, Python, and Perl. It also includes version 10 of the popular GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). We also have the customary updates to underlying infrastructure software, like the GNU C Library. For a full list, see the Change set on the Fedora Wiki.

Testing needed

Since this is a Beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the mailing list or in the #fedora-qa channel on IRC Freenode. As testing progresses, common issues are tracked on the Common F32 Bugs page.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.

What is the Beta Release?

A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the final release. If you take the time to download and try out the Beta, you can check and make sure the things that are important to you are working. Every bug you find and report doesn’t just help you, it improves the experience of millions of Fedora users worldwide! Together, we can make Fedora rock-solid. We have a culture of coordinating new features and pushing fixes upstream as much as we can. Your feedback improves not only Fedora, but Linux and free software as a whole.

More information

For more detailed information about what’s new on Fedora 32 Beta release, you can consult the Fedora 32 Change set. It contains more technical information about the new packages and improvements shipped with this release.


Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash.

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58 Comments

  1. Karlis K.

    Can I upgrade F31 to F32 beta release using:

    sudo dnf upgrade –refresh -y
    sudo dnf system-upgrade download –releasever=32
    sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

    Or is that discouraged and until Final stable release is out one should do a clean install on a dual-boot or within a VM?

    • You can do this. It’s exactly what I did and it worked for me. Because it’s a beta there’s no promises that you won’t have to do some kind of manual cleanup either now or when the final comes out, but in most cases in recent history we’ve been in pretty good shape for beta releases.

      • Lukas Piekarski

        I think I’ll give it a shot. I have Fedora 32 installed on VM and it seems pretty stable.
        What do you mean by “manual cleanup”?

        • Possibly need to remove or add some packages from the command line outside of the dnf system upgrade, and in rare cases make a manual configuration change. Not saying it’s likely here, but things like that have happened in the past and will probably happen in the future with beta releases.

          • Lukas Piekarski

            I’ve upgraded to Fedora 32 today. The process was super easy and went without any errors. I’ve noticed that the booting time has been significantly reduced on SSD. The overall experience is really great!

      • Karlis K.

        I took the plunge and upgraded, only had to remove a couple Copr repos and one or two incompatible packages. I did, however, forget to disable all my Gnome Shell plugins and so I’m unable to log into my old user from the GUI session. Disabling the extensions from terminal (Cockpit to the rescue!) had no effect. Moved the whole user homedir to a backup location, removed the user, rebooted for good measure, created the user anew (same username, same password), still can’t log in. Every time I try to log in it just returns back to the login screen within a split second. Something is kicking it out or Gnome Shell is crashing, can’t see anything possibly causing this with ‘sudo journalctl -f’ while this happens. Creating a new user with a different username allows me to log into the new account just fine, however, every time I try to log into my user containing my old username doesn’t.

        • Lukas Piekarski

          I didn’t disable extensions before the upgrade. After that, I could log into the system. I may be wrong but I think that the extensions were disabled by default after the upgrade. Can’t tell for sure because extensions section in Gnome Tweaks isn’t working properly. I managed installed extensions through Firefox plugin. I don’t have many of them but some of the extensions had to be updated to work with 3.36 and some did not work (dash to dock and cpu power manager – nothing unusual here).

          • Karlis K.

            I copied my backed data into a fresh user and everything seems to work more or less. Some extensions are having difficulties but I’m still not entirely sure it’s because of data being moved around and some parts of the extensions still looking for the old username in the path or because they haven’t been correctly loaded/initialized after the GNOME update (since I wasn’t able to properly log into the user before).
            I use Dash to Panel, I thought it didn’t work at first but then I noticed that as you said – Extensions were disabled altogether, so maybe that is not the issue and something else is causing the problems. Also, supposedly there’s to be a merge between Dash to Panel and Dash to Dock somewhere in the future, but that’s just a rumor as far as I’m aware.

    • DaVid Frantz

      Another little question would doing as Karlis details result in a smooth transition to the release build when it ships?

      Also is the Mesa version known here? My biggest grip with AMD and Linux is the bugs that remain in place for just about forever so getting the newest is always preferred. Bugs that I suspect are GPU bugs.

      • Karlis K.

        I’m actually running Fedora on Radeon RX570 (POLARIS10).

        This is what it’s returning on 32 Beta:
        glxinfo | grep “OpenGL version”
        OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 20.0.1

    • Paweł

      If someone is interested to test the beta version – by default you will also need a dnf plugin to do this:
      sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

      The process is the same as a standard system upgrade, you can find more details here: https://fedoramagazine.org/upgrading-fedora-30-to-fedora-31/

    • Robson Nakane

      To update your Fedora release from the command-line do:

      sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

      and reboot your computer.

      Install the dnf-plugin-system-upgrade package if it is not currently installed:

      sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

      Download the updated packages:

      sudo dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=31

      Change the –releasever= number if you want to upgrade to a different release. Most people will want to upgrade to the latest stable release, which is 31, but in some cases, such as when you’re currently running Fedora 27, you may want to upgrade just to Fedora 28. You can also use 32 to upgrade to a Branched release, or rawhide to upgrade to Rawhide. Note that neither of these two are stable releases.

      If you are upgrading to Rawhide, you will need to import the RPM GPG key for it. This will be the highest numbered key version in /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/. For example, if there is a Branched release that is 30, then you should look for a 31, and if there is currently no Branched release, it will be 30:

      sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-31-primary

      If some of your packages have unsatisfied dependencies, the upgrade will refuse to continue until you run it again with an extra –allowerasing option. This often happens with packages installed from third-party repositories for which an updated repositories hasn’t been yet published. Study the output very carefully and examine which packages are going to be removed. None of them should be essential for system functionality, but some of them might be important for your productivity.

      
      
      In case of unsatisfied dependencies, you can sometimes see more details if you add --best option to the command line.

      If you want to remove/install some packages manually before running dnf system-upgrade download again, it is advisable to perform those operations with --setopt=keepcache=1 dnf command line option. Otherwise the whole package cache will be removed after your operation, and you will need to download all the packages once again.

      Trigger the upgrade process. This will restart your machine into the upgrade process:

      sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

      Once the upgrade process to complete, your system will reboot into the updated release version of Fedora.

      • lars martin

        Nice its first time i can upgrade to beta without issue but why its issue after i upgrade i tryed to use firefox but its freeze my sony laptop completely so i must do Dnf update after upgrade, so we for hope its works or i must boot older system.

        But before fedora 22 its did not works very good to upgrade on this way, did not know why but its ignore upgrade after this step.

  2. sonsuz

    I have an optimus laptop.*
    Does nvidia driver work on beta?

    • Karlis K.

      If you’re using the drivers from the repos they should but I haven’t had the courage to try it out on my laptop with an nvidia card – last time I did an upgrade from Fedora 30 to 31 it all went sideways. It seems I had trouble with the DKMS module now that I’m looking back.

  3. Stephan Goldenberg

    Geez, calm down. I’m still running 30. 😉

    Stay healthy!

  4. Tim K

    I have the F31 KDE spin on my machine.

    If I use the above commands to upgrade in the same way:

    will this upgrade the KDE components needed?
    will it install the default GNOME desktop also?

    Thanks

  5. JCjr

    Still waiting on proper mainline kernel support before I buy a Raspberry Pi 4. I want to be able to use Fedora on one, or else look for an ARM SBC platform that has a complete array of mainline kernel drivers for the hardware, including accelerated video drivers, which always seems to be a big problem with ARM SoC’s. Until ARM gets up to the point where all the hardware in an SBC platform, including said video acceleration as well as wireless support, is included in the mainline Linux kernel as opposed to having vendor-supplied custom kernels, AND has the performance necessary to run GNOME 3 (meaning it’s competitive with x86 and able to run GTK3+ apps smoothly), I find it difficult to take seriously at this time. The RK3399-based systems seem to be some of the better options for performance, but is this going to provide an x86-like (like an older Celeron or something) desktop performance for running the OS, and does it provide decent drivers for things like video acceleration? The benchmark for desktop Linux on ARM should look similar to Android or Chrome OS: at the very least, YouTube and other video sites should be able to play HD video with standard hardware acceleration provided by the video driver, not some browser hack or specific video playback application. Unfortunately, Android devices often use heavily hardware-specific kernel options and even sometimes proprietary drivers or hard-to-obtain firmware blobs that don’t translate over to an up-to-date mainline Linux kernel for a general desktop OS distribution like Fedora. Any opinions on this? Is this situation improving within the Fedora 32 timeframe?

    • husimo

      Same question. Seems that kernel 5.5 add Raspberry Pi 4 support. Is Raspberry 4 support coming soon for CoreOS ? Looking forward to create clusters of RPi managed by Fedora. Thanks !

  6. Works: Cuda 10.2, Torch7, GCC8, Odio?

  7. Andy Mender

    Gonna give it a try and maybe finally join the Fedora community :). I’m on F31 and so far it’s been very solid.

  8. pascal

    Probably too late for this release, but could the Fedora Project consider support for more cloud providers?
    There is an VM image available for AWS, I didn’t test it tbh, but at least on GCE it doesn’t really work or needs some manual tinkering.
    Something which works for the bigger ones like gce, aws, azure and maybe also for some not so big VPS providers would be very much appreciated 🙂

  9. Leslie Satenstein

    With that in mind, just look at one paragraph from the installation guide. A before/after, done with WYSIWYG

    ORIGINAL
    Installation Guide

    Installing Fedora 31 on 32 and 64-bit AMD and Intel

    This manual explains how to boot the Fedora installation program, Anaconda, and how to install Fedora 31 on 32 and 64-bit AMD and Intel systems. It also covers advanced installation methods such as automated Kickstart installations, booting the installation from a network location, remote access to the installation system using VNC, and system upgrades from previous versions of Fedora. It also describes common post-installation tasks and explains how to troubleshoot common issues related to the installation.

    My MODIFICATION
    Installation Guide

    Installing Fedora 31 on 32 and 64-bit AMD and Intel

    This manual explains how to install and  boot the Fedora installation program, Anaconda, and how to install Fedora 31 onto 32 and 64-bit AMD and Intel systems.

    The manual also covers:

    o advanced installation methods such as automated Kickstart installations,
    o booting the installation from a network location,
    o remote access to the installation system using VNC, and
    o system upgrades from previous versions of Fedora.

    The manual also describes common post-installation tasks and explains how to troubleshoot common issues related to the installation.

    If the decision is to allow manual or automated converting of WYSIWYG to adoc, then I am happy to put in many edit hours.

  10. Jack

    I’ve been using Fedora|RedHat since the pre-Fedora days of RedHat 3.0.3 (Picasso).

    On occasion I have reason to search for another distro, but always end up coming back to Fedora. The installation, package support, LSB compliance (mostly), and community (support issues) – not to mention the close relationship with RedHat – are all significant factors in that choice.

    Keep up the good work – please !

  11. chiddekel

    Displaylink driver work only on kernel up to 5.4.xxx
    https://github.com/displaylink-rpm/displaylink-rpm
    The driver can be support from community maintainers ?

  12. Thijs Janssen

    I just installed the beta. The standard background really doesn’t go well with dark themes. I know it’s a matter of taste, but I think the background should be changed before release. I know it seems very minor, but first impressions are important. Maybe I’ll do a request through official channels. What do you think?
    Sorry to the artist for the harsh review.

  13. hammerhead corvette

    Since the majority of my app are flatpaks, my upgrade should be smoother than most right?

  14. marcon florent

    I tested on an MSI pc equipped with Optimus technology: it is very promising. boot a bit long but the intel card is by default used at the same time as the HDMI output. The possibility is offered to launch the applications with the nvidia card. I did not push further because it would have been necessary to load the owners drivers but really well done, great work!

  15. Tom

    Hey, it’s already F32 here, but what about the new Fedora logo? The redesign process and mock-ups seemed promising a year ago. Me and my sister were very excited, but everything seems so eerie quiet on that front now…

    • Well it turns out we surprised Red Hat Legal with this and they didn’t have it in their budget for last year. They do now, so Mo Duffy is making a few final tweaks and then we’ll send it to Legal to do the registration work. I don’t have a specific timeline for this, but we all share your excitement about the new logo.

      • JCjr

        I noticed the design of having different sized loops was already being tried out my another company that was in the process of changing their logo. I don’t recall which company it was, but it was a tech company. Plextor, or Plantronics, or might have been another company, but starting with a P, so be careful with some of those designs – RH might be slapped with a C&D for trademark infringement.

      • Tom

        Wow, thanks for the info! It’s nice to hear that it’s coming! I didn’t know that it involves any costs, so it’s great that Red Hat Legal is dealing with it. Although the current logo is great too and I’m fond of it, an evolution is needed. Máirín’s mock-ups were so great, I’m sure that the new logo will stand-out. Marketing and design is so important to keep the project growing! 🙂

  16. leslie Satenstein

    I have been testing and testing both the network installation version (/dev/sda on my system) and the live installation version (/dev/sdb on my system). The results are identical — absolute solid Desktop system, except for one issue with a gnome extension.
    I am going to pure one of the above and reinstall using the server ISO version. Fedora is a great distribution, and I owe the developers the time to test adequately.
    Subsequently, I will be testing the spins.

  17. Giovanni

    Latest NVIDIA drivers fail to compile with gcc 10 in Fedora 32 Beta.

  18. JCjr

    GNOME Shell seems to crash a lot in a VM created in virt-manager as does GNOME Web.

    I set up the VM using the following: 2GB RAM, 2 CPU cores, UEFI Boot using OVMF, virt-io drivers for everything possible, except for video which is using QXL (it was the default, so I left it).

    Installed via the beta server ISO, not a cloud/VM-specific image. I chose Fedora Workstation as the only role option, with just a language change (en-ca). Default filesystem options (xfs on lvm, I guess because it’s a server installer). Virt-manager detected it as a “Fedora” ISO with no version number (running it on F31ws), and suggested a 20GB vhd for it, which is what I used.

    Also, where do I make suggestions for repo inclusions? I’d like to see if someone can add Shortwave to the main repo or in the registry repo as a flatpak, as it’s now out of beta and a flatpak is on Flathub. GNOME seems to be recommending a default install of just GNOME Music instead of Rhythmbox now, but to fill in the functionality of Rhythmbox, GNOME Podcasts and Shortwave make great mini-app additions.

  19. Mr. Sniffles

    Running on IdeaPad 330, upgrade from 31 went flawlessly. The new UI improvements are looking good.

  20. Chujitso Delgado

    Saludos, yo en mas novato, ¿Como le hago con fedora 31 teniendo mi laptop un procesador AMD?
    Comence con fedora 29, y con 31 se me queda pegada y es el kernel.
    Ya descargue un ISO de fedora32 y loo vi en una maquina virtual.
    ¿es recomendable usar intel clear linux? me da miedo dado mi procesador. y apenas estoy aprendiendo.

  21. Eugine

    For me upgrade was like 1-2-3… easy… but after i faced the issue of long boot cause of “Failed to start udev Wait for Complete Device Initialization” which caused fail of Failed to start udev Wait for Complete Device Initialization and 1 or 2 other services.
    So i can boot and log in F32, but it takes about 4 minutes. Didn’t face such issues since F29.
    By the way booting from live usb causes these issues too.
    Ooops…

  22. Tiago

    I upgraded from 31, and touchpad stopped working with the new kernel (5.6.0-0.rc5), but works properly when the system is booted from the older kernel (5.5.9-200).

    Thinkpad T-440p
    Synaptics tm2964-001

    • Tiago Gadotti

      With today’s uptade to kernel 5.6.0-300, touchpad began to work again.

  23. pams

    Fedora has come a long way.
    But I still wait for the day where I dont have to install a single extension and epiphany can handle all the extensions if required.
    Adwaita is excellent, but a tweaked theme along the lines just for fedora would never require anyone to install another theme and just focus on what they do.
    Those days are not far away.
    Stay safe Everyone.

  24. Theodore Alexopoulos

    NVidia broken, asus ac53 wireless broken….

  25. Jose M.

    I’d like to help test Fedora 32 on the Pinebook Pro but so far none of the images on arm.fedoraproject.org work. Can someone point me to an image that actually works on this but not the Fedora 31 version that’s on the Pine wiki please?

    i’m more than willing to give proper test reports if assisted.

    Thank you!!!

  26. sam

    Please improve the bash-completion in terminal. It is very slow compared to other distros and thats the only reason stopping me from using Fedora on a daily bases because I like to use terminal a lot more.

  27. mandrade

    noticed that support for the Raspberry PI4 is not announced. However using the minimal install I am running with no problems the PI4

  28. Brad

    I love this beta. I love the way things have been improving in Gnome. can’t wait for Gnome 4!

  29. Thomas

    I often want to look forward to a new release of Fedora, however, I see accessibility continue to degrade release after release. For totally blind individuals like myself, contributing to this community or using the software has basically become an impossibility. The last extremely accessible desktop on Linux was Gnome Flashback and Gnome and libreOffice devs have pushed accessibility to the side to focus on the new and the shiny. If this was all contributor based, it would be one thing, however, it looks bad when you realize that companies are paying devs to work on these things and selling them. I have no problem when people push adoption of open source in their communities, however, you should know that currently open source software excludes a huge chunk of society with the shotty accessibility support and it is the difference in this polish that makes software like the Fedora/gnome desktop feel like it was developed in someones basement while Microsoft and Apple develop professional software. You should know that when you enable accessibility in LibreOffice, it actually enables code paths that cause the software to crash and behave in other odd ways. These are security risks and deficiencies that have been ignored for years. Proudly writing this from a Windows 10 laptop from a company (Microsoft) that actually cares about accessibility and works to ensure I as a blind person can use their software

  30. Thomas

    In my second message, I just want to write a few of the difficulties a blind person will experience when trying to use fedora so that people actually understand what its like to use a computer with Orca, the included screen reader in fedora. A screen reader is used by someone with a visual impairment and reads the text on screen out loud for users or displays it in braille.
    When opening the settings application, the categories are not spoken by the screen reader. Imagine not being able to change any settings on your machine. This is the reality of using Gnome as a blind person.
    When using LibreOffice, the screen reader can barely read tables, and does not alert users about many formatting changes in documents. Imagine trying to create professionally formatted documents in a job setting when you have no clue what formatting changes have been applied to the document you are working on.
    It is also not possible to use Evolution due to bugs in Webkit accessibility that cause the Webkit processes to crash and not communicate information to the Orca screen reader. Imagine not being able to perform basic tasks like use a calendar or check your mail.
    There are also many applications in Gnome that have unlabeled buttons. Since a screen reader can’t interpret icon labels/pictures, text button labels are important which describe functionality so that it can be spoken. One example with many unlabeled buttons is the Gnome Terminal. Blind users are forced to press buttons which they have no idea the function of, wasting time and decreasing productivity. Any half decent automated testing framework catches button labels missing from applications so that developers can fix them and I wonder why such a feature isn’t a part of Gnomes development.
    As I mentioned in my last message, if this was volunteers, it would be one thing, however, this is companies with tons of money working on this stuff and then selling it.
    If Microsoft and Apple can make accessibility happen, the companies behind Gnome can as well. I bet many people would be surprised to know that extremely complicated software like Microsoft Office, iWork, Xcode and Visual Studio are totally usable by blind individuals due to the developers thinking about accessibility when building the software.

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