Will In-Place Upgrade From 40 Cinnamon To 41 Cinnamon Work? I Don't Know How To Fix Linux

Ask Fedora
1

Hi,

I’ve been using Linux distros since Windows 8 came out.
I am very new to Fedora Linux - I am a distro hopper, but my go to Linux is Linux Mint.

I don’t know how to fix a Linux if it breaks.
Will in-place upgrade from “40 Cinnamon” retail to “41 Cinnamon” retail work well?

The desktop PC I run Fedora on is a mission critical development computer.
Also, will detailed instructions be released with the official retail release of Fedora 41?

Let me know, thanks!

James

james@fedora:~$ neofetch
             .',;::::;,'.                james@fedora 
         .';:cccccccccccc:;,.            ---------- 
      .;cccccccccccccccccccccc;.         OS: Fedora Linux 40 (Cinnamon) x86_64 
    .:cccccccccccccccccccccccccc:.       Kernel: 6.10.11-200.fc40.x86_64 
  .;ccccccccccccc;.:dddl:.;ccccccc;.     Uptime: 1 day, 11 hours, 41 mins 
 .:ccccccccccccc;OWMKOOXMWd;ccccccc:.    Packages: 2638 (rpm), 24 (flatpak) 
.:ccccccccccccc;KMMc;cc;xMMc:ccccccc:.   Shell: bash 5.2.26 
,cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cc;;WW::cccccccc,   Resolution: 1920x1080 
:cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc:   DE: Cinnamon 6.2.9 
:ccccccc;oxOOOo;MMM0OOk.;cccccccccccc:   WM: Mutter (Muffin) 
cccccc:0MMKxdd:;MMMkddc.;cccccccccccc;   WM Theme: Mint-Y-Dark-Sand (Adwaita) 
ccccc:XM0';cccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc'   Theme: Mint-Y-Dark-Sand [GTK2/3] 
ccccc;MMo;ccccc;MMW.;ccccccccccccccc;    Icons: Mint-Y-Sand [GTK2/3] 
ccccc;0MNc.ccc.xMMd:ccccccccccccccc;     Terminal: gnome-terminal 
cccccc;dNMWXXXWM0::cccccccccccccc:,      CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (16) @ 3.800GHz 
cccccccc;.:odl:.;cccccccccccccc:,.       GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Lite Hash 
:cccccccccccccccccccccccccccc:'.         Memory: 14625MiB / 31996MiB 
.:cccccccccccccccccccccc:;,..
  '::cccccccccccccc::;,.
2

I’m sure others will chime in with helpful comments, but one important thing to note is that you don’t have to upgrade straight away when Fedora 41 comes out. Fedora 40 will still be supported for another 7 months after that.

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3

Hi,

I tried current snapshot ISO of Fedora 41 Cinnamon in VirtualBox.
Dnfdragora does not work properly?

I’ll wait til F40 becomes obsolete(+ 7 months) before trying the in-place upgrade to F41.
Would take a full day to do a fresh install, want to avoid that.

James

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5

Err… Is it just me or is this… not very smart :face_with_peeking_eye:
Link to Fedora Docs on how to upgrade is already given. Personally I’m not in a huge rush to upgrade from 40 to 41. I will let other peope iron out all the issues when 41 is released to the masses before I will upgrade to it.

6

I agree. It would seem reasonable to wait while others find the potential (and somewhat likely) issues, then after the bugs have been chased down and eliminated perform the upgrade.

On a mission critical system it seems rather risky to jump into the deep water without a recovery plan that could make recovery easy.

While waiting it seems also reasonable to learn as much as possible and prepare for potential problems.

Every wise administrator I have known always follows the adage from the military. “Plan for the worst and Hope for the best!”

7

If you are running something important, sticking with the N-1 release of Fedora Linux is a very reasonable thing to do. I run several Fedora Linux servers that host production services for the CS department at a University and they are usually on the N-1 release (but with the latest updates applied :slight_smile: ).

Another thing you might want to investigate if you want to be able to recover your system in case an update fails[1] is Btrfs snapshots. There should be better tooling to help users create a recovery snapshot of their root filesystem before they upgrade and restore it in case they need to. Unfortunately, such tooling doesn’t exist and you have to run several commands to get it done. Having to learn the lower-level workings of the filesystem isn’t necessarily a bad thing though. Such knowledge can come in handy in case something does go wrong. But you will likely want to experiment with the commands on a test system of some sort until you get comfortable enough with the concepts to do it on your production system.

  1. It is unlikely that an update will fail, but depending on your hardware and what third-party software you have installed, it can happen ↩︎

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