Fedora Linux was released Tuesday, bringing major updates to various desktop environments, as well as support for AI development.

Fedora is a popular Linux distro that serves as the upstream basis for what eventually becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As a result, Fedora serves as something of a testbed and is well-established in the Linux ecosystem as the distro that pushes adoption of new technologies, such as PipeWire and Wayland.

On the desktop environment front, Fedora Workstation ships with the recently released Gnome 46, while the KDE spin ships with KDE Plasma 6. Similarly, the Cinnamon spin ships with the latest Cinnamon 6.

Fedora 40 continues its trend of adopting new technologies, including PyTorch for the first time, according to Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller.

Fedora Linux 40 ships with our first-ever PyTorch package. PyTorch is a popular framework for deep learning, and it can be difficult to reliably install with the right versions of drivers and libraries and so on. The current package only supports running on the CPU, without GPU or NPU acceleration, but this is just the first step. Our aim is to produce a complete stack with PyTorch and other popular tools ready to use on a wide variety of hardware out-of-the-box.

We’re also shipping with ROCm 6 — open-source software that provides acceleration support for AMD graphics cards. We plan to have that enabled for PyTorch in a future release.

AI is already a controversial topic for many, and nowhere are there stronger feelings about it than within the Linux community. Many look to Linux as the last bastion of AI-free computing, with developers of the Gentoo distro even banning any contributions that were made with AI assistance. As Nick with The Linux Experiment points out, even Linux creator Linus Torvalds said the current AI hype is “hilarious to watch,” and that the current tech is basically “autocorrect on steroids.”

Nonetheless, Fedora has made clear the project’s intention to become “the best community platform for AI,” as Miller shared in in a Fedora Strategy 2024: April 2024 Update.

The Guiding Star for Strategy 2028 is about growing our contributor base. We can make Fedora Linux the best community platform for AI, and in doing so, open a new frontier of contribution and community potential.

This won’t be easy. We have a lot of basic work on platform fundamentals. That’s drivers and tooling, packages and containers, and even new ways of distributing Fedora software. We also need to improve developer experience — for example, it’d be nice to have Podman Desktop as part of Fedora, with easy paths to getting started.

We can use AI/ML as part of making the Fedora Linux OS. New tools could help with package automation and bug triage. They could note anomalies in test results and logs, maybe even help identify potential security issues. We can also create infrastructure-level features for our users. For example, package update descriptions aren’t usually very meaningful. We could automatically generate concise summaries of what’s new in each system update — not just for each package, but highlighting what’s important in the whole set, including upstream change information as well.

Whatever antipathy much of the desktop Linux community may feel toward AI, if the Fedora Project is including initial support—with plans to increasingly embrace AI—it’s likely only a matter of time before other distros follow suit.