How to upgrade Fedora to the beta version of 37

If you’re antsy to check out what’s in store for Fedora 37, Jack Wallen is here to show you how you can upgrade your earlier version to the latest beta release.

Okay, let me start by saying: Don’t do this on a machine you depend upon for productivity.

With that warning out of the way, let’s talk Fedora 37 beta. This upcoming release will include GNOME 43, a much-improved file manager, improved support for web apps, a new system menu and a new device security panel. Given how amazing Fedora 36 has been, logic would dictate that 37 will be nothing but improvements to what many consider to be the best Linux distribution on the market.

SEE: 40+ open source and Linux terms you need to know (TechRepublic Premium)

The official release of Fedora 37 is Oct. 18, 2022. Because that date is soon upon us, you can be sure that the state of Fedora 37 is ripe for use. If you’re antsy to get your hands on Fedora 37, you could either download and install the OS from the daily builds, or you could simply upgrade your current installation. I went ahead and tested the upgrade and found it to be pretty rock solid.

What you’ll need to upgrade to Fedora 37

To successfully upgrade to the latest beta of Fedora you’ll need a running instance of Fedora — preferably Fedora 36 — and a user with sudo privileges.

How to upgrade to Fedora 37 beta

Log in to your instance of Fedora and open a terminal window. The first thing you must do is upgrade all of the currently installed software with the command:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

After that command completes, you must install the DNF upgrade plugin with:

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

When that plugin has been installed, we need to inform DNF that we want to download the Fedora 37 release with:

sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=37

This command will take considerable time to complete, so you can either sit back and watch the output fly by or go take care of something else until it completes.

Finally, once everything has been downloaded, reboot the machine with the reboot option like so:

sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

Once again, you’ll have to wait until the upgrade completes. As with the 37 download process, this will take some time to complete. However, once the above command does complete, you will be presented with the login screen, where you can log in to Fedora and enjoy the beta version of 37.

Remember, you should do this on a non-production machine for testing purposes. Although I’ve found the beta version of Fedora 37 to be very reliable, you might want to hold off until the official release is made available and either do a fresh install or upgrade when prompted by the system.

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