The Fedora Project has released Fedora 44 Beta, powered by Linux kernel 6.19, marking the start of the testing phase ahead of the final release in mid-April.
Fedora 44 Beta brings several installer and desktop updates. Notably, Anaconda now creates network profiles only for devices configured during installation, instead of generating profiles for all detected interfaces.
On Fedora’s KDE editions, users get Plasma 6.6, with the new Plasma Setup application now handling post-installation configuration, allowing Anaconda to remove redundant setup steps. Additionally, Fedora KDE switches its default display manager from SDDM to the Plasma Login Manager.
The Workstation edition offers users GNOME 50 RC, with the stable version expected next week and scheduled to arrive in the final Fedora 44 release.
Fedora Games Lab has been updated as well and now uses KDE Plasma instead of Xfce, providing a modern Wayland-based stack for gaming and game development. Fedora Budgie ships with Budgie 10.10, transitioning from X11 to Wayland to support future desktop environment development.
Fedora Linux 44 Beta enhances the LiveCD experience with automatic device tree selection, enabling aarch64 live images to work on Windows on ARM laptops. The live media environment is modernized with updated scripts and automatic persistent overlays for USB installations.
Apart from the desktop updates, the GNU toolchain stack, including GCC, glibc, binutils, and GDB, has been updated to the latest upstream versions. Plus, the Nix package manager is now available as a developer tool in Fedora repositories.
Fedora’s build infrastructure is progressing toward fully reproducible builds. The project reports approximately 90 percent reproducibility and aims for at least 99 percent in the final Fedora 44 release.
This beta also updates system and packaging components, including Golang 1.26, MariaDB 11.8 as the default, IBus 1.5.34, Django 6.x, TagLib 2, Helm 4, Ansible 13, and TeX Live 2025.
Several legacy components are being removed. Fedora will no longer build QEMU for 32-bit host systems, remove FUSE 2 libraries from Atomic desktops, and drop support for deprecated pkla polkit rules.
For more details, see the announcement or look here.
The beta is available for Fedora’s main editions, including Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, IoT, and Cloud. Users can download installation images from the official mirrors. The Fedora CoreOS “next” stream is expected to adopt the Fedora 44 beta base about a week later.
Are the users of KDE Plasma lucky that they are constantly getting updates. Image their desktop environment would be what they call “legacy” and actually just work. These users would have to start thinking about being productive with their Linux system. No, let’s keep updating. Thank you IBM Red Hat.