Two of the biggest names in fixed-release distros are nearly finished and ready to drop. You can taste them now, but they’re not fully baked yet.

This cycle, Fedora 43 started plumping a little before Ubuntu. The project just released the beta version and it has an uncharacteristically short list of new features. There is a full changeset document that lists all the updated components, but at the time of writing, systemd is notably absent.

All editions of Fedora 43 use the new browser-based installer, called Anaconda WebUI. As it happens, this parallels the Agama installer in the openSUSE Leap 16 RC that we looked at last month.

When we wrote about this six months ago looking at the beta of Fedora 42, the new installer was only used in the GNOME Workstation edition. Now it’s in all the “spins” with their different desktops and the other editions.

The installer also uses the new DNF5 version of the package manager. This has been available for some years now – according to the project page, it’s been an optional extra since Fedora 38, two and a half years ago. Now it’s becoming a standard part of the distribution. There are naturally more changes underneath the covers, with new versions of the various language compilers, interpreters, and editors Fedora includes, such as a refreshed GNU toolchain.

Fedora Kinoite, the immutable version based on the KDE Plasma desktop, which The Register covered in early 2021, now comes with automatic background updates enabled. This seems to suggest growing confidence in the immutable variant. Fedora’s underlying immutability technology is also behind the Universal Blue project, and a growing family of distros are built on that, including the Bazzite gaming distro.

Ubuntu mystery marsupial

Trailing a few days behind Fedora’s beta comes Canonical’s latest preview. As announced on the company’s curiously named Fridge “information hub” on Friday, the Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) Beta is now public.

There’s more new shiny in this version than in Fedora, but we have less to tell you about it because we’ve already covered many of the highlights: the new coreutils implemented in Rust, the Trusted Platform Module chip-backed full disk encryption, and the new accessories and components that were listed when it went into feature freeze. The beta’s release notes have more details of what’s in store. ®