How to Upgrade Fedora to the Next Release

Fedora ships a new release every six months and supports each release for thirteen months. To avoid running out of security updates, you upgrade. The blessed path is dnf system-upgrade.

Prerequisites

• Fedora N (e.g. 39) → upgrading to N+1 (e.g. 40) or N+2.
• All current updates applied (sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y).
• An out-of-band console for headless servers. The upgrade reboots into a new initrd.

Step 1: Apply current updates first

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y
sudo dnf autoremove -y
sudo dnf clean all
sudo systemctl reboot          # if the kernel changed

A clean N-with-all-updates is the safest starting state.

Step 2: Install the upgrade plugin

sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugin-system-upgrade

(On Fedora 41+ it is dnf5-plugin-system-upgrade.)

Step 3: Download the next release

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=40

--releasever is the version number of where you are going. Resolve any conflicts the prompt mentions (third-party repos are the usual culprit — RPM Fusion, NodeSource, Docker, etc. need the matching repo for the new release).

The download phase does NOT reboot. You can cancel cleanly with:

sudo dnf system-upgrade clean

Step 4: Reboot into the upgrade

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

The host reboots into a special target where DNF replaces every installed package. Headless servers must be on a console (IPMI, hypervisor) — the upgrade runs in plymouth/text. Expect 10–30 minutes depending on package count.

When it finishes, it reboots again into the new release.

Step 5: Post-upgrade housekeeping

cat /etc/fedora-release
sudo dnf autoremove -y
sudo dnf system-upgrade clean
sudo rpmconf -a                       # reconcile .rpmnew / .rpmsave files

rpmconf (from package rpmconf) walks you through each config file that ships a new version, so you can keep your local edits or accept upstream's new defaults.

Step 6: Re-enable held repos

Third-party repos are commonly disabled during the upgrade. Re-enable them:

ls /etc/yum.repos.d/
sudo dnf repolist --disabled | head
sudo dnf config-manager --enable rpmfusion-free-updates

Verify

cat /etc/os-release
uname -r
sudo dnf check
sudo dnf list --upgrades

Conclusion

dnf system-upgrade is the only correct path between Fedora releases. Skip a release if you must (N → N+2 works), but never skip more than that — the package conflict matrix gets unkind.

Next steps

• For the underlying tooling see DNF vs YUM.
• For long-term stability switch to Rocky Linux 9.
• Keep updated in the meantime with DNF package manager basics.