Fedora 41 Upgrade - Legacy Applications

Following an upgrade from Fedora 40 to 41, I noticed I didn't have the new ptyxis Terminal application which I had seen discussed in various "Whats new in Fedora 41" articles.

After a bit of googling, I learned that this was by design. Even when performing a full upgrade to a new Fedora release, if an application has been replaced with a new default, you will retain the old application so that your experience is maintained and there is less disruption to your daily workflow.

Thankfully, it is pretty easy to get the new default applications using dnf groups. I've never heard of these before, but simply installing or upgrading the workstation-product-environment group should install the new default packages like ptyxis.

$ sudo dnf group install workstation-product-environment

This will install the new default apps, but you'll be left with duplicates. Jumping to the overview and typing "termin" left me with two choices for a "Terminal" application:- ptyxis and gnome-terminal.

The Fedora upgrade docs describe using a package called remove-retired-packages. However, this did not offer to remove gnome-terminal for me. Probably because it's not yet retired - just not the new default terminal app for new installs. So It was a case of manually removing the version I no longer wanted and cleaning up any dependencies that are no longer needed:-

$ sudo dnf remove gnome-terminal
...
$ sudo dnf autoremove

This leaves me with just the one Terminal app.

I'll have to do more digging to see if there are more apps that can be replaced and old versions removed. I was mostly interested in using the new ptyxis app as I spend a lot of time in the terminal.