HowTo: Install Fedora Rawhide, the "nightly" testing branch

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Background

Fedora is a semi-rolling distro.

This means there will be feature updates during a version (for example different KDE Plasma Versions during the life of Fedora 40), and the kernel follows upstream closely, on both the current and the older supported variant.

Fedora releases a version every 6 months, while these are supported for 13 months. This means there is a current and an old supported version. The current version has newer software.

All software has bugs, and if it is less tested, there will be more.

Fedora Rawhide

Fedora Rawhide is the bleeding edge, where things are released with only little testing. It follows upstream very closely.

If you

  • are experienced in Fedora’s Bug tracking system (or willing to learn)
  • able to get relevant system information
  • would like to help make the current release more stable

you can install Fedora Rawhide.

Recommended are a secondary drive (also an external SSD possible) or a virtual machine (using virt-manager for example).

You find the Fedora Rawhide Docs here

Upgrading to Fedora Rawhide

Traditional Variants (dnf)

You can upgrade from the current release to Rawhide. Here is documentation.

Prepare for the upgrade by updating your system to the latest state.

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf autoremove
reboot

Make sure you use the newest version of Fedora!

Then use the traditional upgrade method, and use rawhide as the version number.

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=rawhide`
sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

If you are not on the latest version of Fedora, upgrade to it using the above command first, then repeat for Rawhide.

Atomic Desktops (rpm-ostree)

On The Fedora Atomic desktops you can rebase to Rawhide more easily and safely.

It is not that important if your system is updated, but to be sure:

rpm-ostree update --reboot

Backups

If you want to keep the latest stable version as a backup (please dont use Rawhide on your main system) you can pin it:

rpm-ostree status

This shows the list of installed versions, the first one is 0, the second is 1, the third one is 2 and so on.
0 is either the currently used image, or if you did an update without rebooting, the pending image (the image that you will use after rebooting).

If you only have 2 in the list, pin (save) the current one:

sudo ostree admin pin 0

This does not work if the first one is not yet used. Then you pin image 1:

sudo ostree admin pin 1

Rebase

On Atomic Desktops your rebase depends on the used image:

  • Desktop, for example silverblue or kinoite
  • Architecture, for example x86_64 or arm64

The command is:

rpm-ostree rebase --reboot fedora:fedora/<version>/<architecture>/<variant>

Example for Fedora Silverblue on a standard Intel or AMD Laptop/PC:

rpm-ostree rebase --reboot fedora:fedora/rawhide/x86_64/silverblue

After the reboot, you will be on Rawhide.

Installing from ISO

The Fedora building system produces ISO files for every Rawhide version, which you can find here.

Here you can download the ISO file of your edition, depending on your version and architecture.

Flash the ISO to a pendrive how you would do normally. Recommended tools:

Note

I didnt use traditional Fedora very long, so if there are mistakes, please correct :slight_smile:

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Removed amd, intel, kde, kde-plasma, kinoite

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Added experimental