Fedora 38 upgrade

As of April 18, 2023 Fedora 38 is available. Compared to the previous release, Fedora 37, there are not a large amount of changes that a desktop user will notice. This release includes the GNOME desktop version 44 which includes a new lock screen, new “background” apps settings menu and they reduced the default grace period given to processes when you shut down your system which will make sure your system powers off quickly.

This release also introduces version 5 of the dnf package manager as an option. If you do development, you will find that this release includes newer versions of compilers and libraries such as GCC 13, Golang 1.20, LLVM 16, Ruby 3.2, TeXLive2022, PHP 8.2 and more.

I upgraded a desktop and a laptop system using the dnf plugin and everything worked perfectly.

Upgrade

Prerequisites

Before you upgrade, ensure that you have backed up important files somewhere other than on the computer you are upgrading. The upgrade went well for me but when upgrading operating systems, there is never a guarantee your system will not encounter problems.

BTRFS snapshot

If you are using btrfs filesystem which was the default option for the past few versions of Fedora, I recommend taking a snapshot of your system before the upgrade. If something goes wrong you can simply roll back your whole system to the state of when you took the snapshot.

Determine which partitions or sub-volumes for btrfs are on you root partition

1

sudo btrfs subvol list /

If you are using the default settings, there should be a root subvolume. Taking a snapshot of this will allow you to roll back a failed upgrade. Determine the btrfs mount with df -T and create a new directory to mount your btrfs partition and take a snapshot

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/snapshots

sudo mount /dev/dm-0 /mnt/snapshots

cd /mnt/snapshots

ls

You should see root in this directory. That is the root subvolume to take a snapshot

1

sudo btrfs subvol snapshot root f38.snapshot

You should see that a snapshot was created in this directory. This can be used to boot from if the upgrade fails. Press e when you see the GRUB boot loader and change the subvol of the root partition from root to f38.snapshot or whatever you call the snapshot.

Update all packages

Before you upgrade, make sure your current system is up to date:

1

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

In order to download and install the new release, you may need to install a plugin for the dnf package manager.

1

sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

Download new release

Once you have the system upgrade plugin, download the new release:

1

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=38

During this process, a new GPG key is imported, you are asked to verify the key’s fingerprint. Refer to here to do so.

Install the new release

Once the new release is downloaded, enter the following command to reboot and install the updates:

1

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

Once the system upgrade completes you should be able to log into your system to verify everything works.