New this cycle: Fedora KDE Desktop is now an Edition provided by the KDE SIG through the Personal Systems WG! :tada:

Change document about this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Promote_KDE_Plasma_Desktop_variant_to_Edition

New website stuff is being worked on by @carlschwan :wine_glass:

Also new this cycle: Fedora KDE is now supported on Power Systems (ppc64le). Thanks to @sharkcz, we now have the full KDE stack (including KDE PIM) available on Power and we now have installable live images for OpenPOWER based systems like the Talos Workstation from Raptor Systems.

Note that Fedora KDE for ppc64le is not release-blocking and is available on a best-effort basis. Community assistance to support it is welcome!

Currently, the planned release of KDE Plasma for this cycle is 6.3. Upstream release announcement: https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.0/

Another new thing this cycle: @alyssa, @dcavalca, and I have integrated support for x86 emulation powered by FEX into Fedora KDE. This expands the usability of Fedora KDE on AArch64 by enabling x86_64 applications to work on ARM using a Fedora FEX rootfs image. This is particularly optimized for running Windows or Steam applications.

Change document about this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/FEX

FYI @amoloney

(There may be more stuff to come, but I think the major highlights are here.)

Fedora level things of note:

• Anaconda is now a Wayland-native application: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Anaconda_As_Native_Wayland_Application
  • Anaconda operating as a native Wayland application simplifies the installer stack and enables the installer to influence the environment when the user chooses the language to install in.
• Fedora default wallpapers now use JXL: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwitchToJXLforDefaultWallpaper
  • The switch to this modern image format significantly reduces the used storage for wallpapers.
• More MIPI cameras supported: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/X86_MIPI_CameraHwEnablement
  • This follows up on the work in Fedora Linux 41 and expands support for MIPI cameras.
• Plymouth now uses SimpleDRM by default: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/PlymouthUseSimpledrm
  • This speeds up system boot by avoiding the need to load the full graphics driver for the splash screen.
• /usr/sbin has been merged into /usr/bin (sbinmerge): https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Unify_bin_and_sbin
  • This should be largely transparent but is a large simplification of where executables go on a Fedora system for packagers and where users can identify them (they are now all in /usr/bin).

We shipped Plasma 6.3.4 for the GA release.

New website courtesy of @carlschwan has been live since Beta: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/

FYI there's a ticket open for the magazine article: https://pagure.io/fedora-magazine-newsroom/issue/384

And the article preview here: https://fedoramagazine.org/?p=41933&preview=1&_ppp=f3652fe785

The article has been published, alongside the launch of Fedora Linux 42 today: https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-for-fedora-kde-plasma-desktop-42/