How many releases of Fedora can I upgrade from?

Upgrades are an important part of a SysAdmin’s job, whether you know you’re one or not. If you think about updates and upgrades, then you are a SysAdmin.

Updates are software fixes and enhancements that don’t cause or require an iteration of the Linux release, such as from Fedora 41 to Fedora 42. Upgrades replace all, or almost all, of Linux and its associated software, so it’s a new release from Fedora 41 to 42.

All recommendations regarding any Linux distribution, are that upgrades should be made as soon as practical when new releases become available. However, I was curious to discover the oldest version of Fedora I could start with in order to upgrade to the current release, Fedora 41. Fedora has a tool specifically designed to perform upgrades, dnf-upgrade.

There is a limitation in that the dnf-upgrade tool should only upgrade a maximum of 2 releases at a time. So you can upgrade from Fedora 49 or 40 to 41 and expect everything to work as it should. Beyond that, upgrading directly from, say, F35 to F41 might result in errors caused by missed new versions or obsoletes of software contained in the various releases. This could result in an unstable system which is not a good thing.

I experimented on one of my VMs to see if I could upgrade from F35 to F41. I did not do so directly. I upgraded two releases at a time, as recommended by the tool’s documentation, from F35 to F37 to F39, to F41. Yes, that took a bit of time, but it worked perfectly and everything worked exactly as it should.

For Fedora, at least, all those old repositories are still there and can be used to upgrade from very old versions of Fedora. I don’t know about other distros, but if you have any information about your favorite distros, please let us know in the comments.

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