Fedora Linux 45 Released with GNOME 51, Kernel 7.2 and RPM 6.1

Security and packaging changes

RPM now checks digital signatures of packages by default. Installing an unsigned package, or one with an invalid signature, produces an error unless the user explicitly runs rpm with the "-nosignature" flag. Previously RPM itself only verified integrity through hashes, while authenticity was checked by YUM and DNF.

RPM itself moves to version 6.1. It introduces a new syntax for macro modifiers, restores NSS as the default for looking up users and groups, fixes a problem where all rpmdb queries stalled during transactions, and can sign files using PKCS11 tokens. A new "%openpgpverify" macro lets packages use the Rust-based Sequoia toolkit instead of GnuPG for verification.

Repository configuration files that are installed along with a repository move from /etc/yum.repos.d to /usr/share/dnf5/repos.d, and PGP keys move to /usr/share/pki/rpm-gpg. This should make it easier to separate default settings from those edited by the user.

Desktop and installer

GNOME 51 brings optimizations aimed at smoother output and fewer freezes during animations or heavy load. It adds automatic switching between landscape and portrait orientation on devices with an accelerometer, smart card forwarding in remote desktop sessions, enterprise web-service authentication on the login screen, and SVG vector cursors.

The atomic editions, including Silverblue and Kinoite, replace the GTK-based Anaconda installer with Anaconda WebUI, already used in Fedora Workstation. It supports remote installation: a user boots the target machine with the "inst.webui.remote" option and controls the process from a browser on another computer, with PIN authentication and encrypted traffic.

Desktop editions also swap gnome-keyring and kwallet for oo7, a Rust-written Secret Service provider, and the kernel fbcon console driver gives way to the user-space kmscon, which uses KMS and offers better rendering, font and Unicode support. Maintainers of atomic editions can now allow installing selected verified apps from Flathub instead of Fedora's own rebuilt Flatpaks.