With 2024 on the horizon, it's time to consider what's in store for the likes of Fedora 40, and there is plenty.

First off, Fedora 40 will ship with KDE Plasma 6, filled with Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 goodness. This update alone will be considerable, especially when you know that it will finally drop X11 and default to Wayland.

Although you can already opt for Plasma Wayland with KDE Plasma 5.27, it's buggy. By the time version 40 arrives, the plan is to have all those bugs fixed so Plasma 6 runs like a champ.

Even with X11 dropped from Fedora 40, the developers have made it clear that support for X11 apps also will be available with KDE Plasma 6, thanks to Xwayland.

This doesn't mean KDE Plasma 5 for X11 will hang around. According to the official wiki, "The KDE Plasma stack is fairly large and comprehensive. The SIG does not have the resources to maintain the KDE Plasma 5 stack beyond the lifetime of upstream's focus. It would also be fairly complex to do so, requiring a lot of downstream patching to resolve the conflicts between Plasma 5 and Plasma 6. The intent upstream is that KDE Plasma 5 will be EOL shortly after the release of KDE Plasma 6, so it would be very difficult to support ourselves."

In other words, once Fedora 40 arrives, the only option will be KDE Plasma 6.

Fedora 40 also will bring about the new Anaconda WebUI installer, kernel TLS support for GnuTLS, and DNF/RPM Copy on Write. The developers also plan to deprecate libuser and remove the passwd package.

You can read about all the changes coming to Fedora 40 here.