Fedora Linux is often hailed as one of the most advanced yet user-friendly leading-edge Linux distributions available. If you’re running Fedora and want to keep that edge, you’ll want to upgrade your system to the newest available version as soon as possible.
Public beta testing of Fedora Workstation 36 kicked off in March 2022. Now, with the final release set for April 19, 2022 (with April 26 as the fallback date), here’s everything you need to know about upgrading your system to Fedora 36 as soon as it’s available.
The Officially Supported Fedora 36 Upgrade Method
The officially recommended and community-supported way of upgrading your Fedora system to the latest version is to use the DNF package manager at the terminal command line. Don’t worry if you’re not a command-line power user. We’ll take you through it step by step, and you’ll be running the latest version of Fedora in no time. Go ahead and open a terminal window and let’s get started.
Fedora 36 is not publicly available at the time of writing, but it might be when you’re reading this. Hence, screenshots show an upgrade from Fedora 34 to 35 to illustrate the process. Regardless, all commands in this article are accurate to upgrade to Fedora 36.
Apply All Updates to Your Current Fedora Installation
Before you can upgrade to a new version of Fedora, you’ll need to ensure that your current installation is fully updated. This is critically important. Bypassing this step and going directly to the upgrade can cause major problems with the upgrade process and even system failures.
In the command prompt, enter:
sudo dnf upgrade
This will check to see if there are any updates available for the version of Fedora that you are currently running and wait for a few minutes for it to complete. If it finds updates, answer yes at the continuation prompt and let the package manager do its work.
After you finish applying the updates, reboot your computer and enter the command one more time to ensure that the process was successful.
Install the System Upgrade Plugin
The DNF system upgrade plugin should already be installed on most Fedora systems. Since the entire upgrade process depends on this plugin, it’s worth double-checking that it’s there.
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgradeDownload the Upgrade Packages
One simple command will download all necessary packages and system verification keys in preparation for the upgrade.
sudo dnf system-upgrade download
It will take a few moments for the system to check in with Fedora servers and get the list of packages needed for the upgrade.
Once complete, you will see a (long) list of packages that will be installed and/or upgraded, along with a prompt asking you to confirm the operation. Answer yes, and the download will begin.
The download will be somewhere around 1.5GB. And, of course, the time required to download will depend on your internet connection quality.
Reboot to Start the Offline Upgrade
Fedora uses an offline upgrade system, meaning that once your system downloads all the packages, it will reboot into a special mode to install all of the update packages. Depending on your system’s performance, it can take anywhere from about 30 minutes to a few hours for the upgrade process to finish.
To begin, enter the following command:
dnf system-upgrade rebootYou’re Now Running the Latest Version of Fedora
When the upgrade process completes, your system will automatically reboot. That’s all there is to it. Congratulations! You are now running Fedora 36. You’ve secured your place on the leading edge of Linux technology. Well, at least until the next Fedora release is ready. Enjoy!