After two delays, Fedora Linux 44 is now available, bringing GNOME 50 to Fedora Workstation, KDE Plasma 6.6 to the KDE edition, a reworked KDE onboarding experience, Budgie 10.10 with Wayland changes, Linux kernel 6.19, and a broad refresh of Fedora’s developer tooling.
On the Workstation side, the headline change is GNOME 50. The release updates core GNOME apps and system components, including accessibility, color management, remote desktop handling, Files, Calendar, Document Viewer, and other desktop parts.
Fedora KDE also receives a notable update with KDE Plasma 6.6.4, accompanied by Frameworks 6.25 and KDE Gear 25.12.3 apps collection. Beyond the version bump, Fedora’s KDE variants now use Plasma Login Manager instead of SDDM. The distro also added Plasma Setup, providing KDE users a more integrated first-run configuration flow after installation.
Another KDE-related change arrives in Fedora Games Lab, which switches from Xfce to KDE Plasma. Fedora Budgie is updated to Budgie 10.10, continuing Budgie’s transition from X11 to Wayland.
Under the hood, Fedora 44 ships with Linux kernel 6.19 and several hardware and system-level updates. One is automatic device tree selection for aarch64 EFI systems, improving the live-media experience on supported Windows on Arm laptops. Fedora’s live images also get updated scripts and support automatic persistent overlays when written to USB media.
For developers, Fedora 44 refreshes many core components and programming stacks. The release includes GCC 16, glibc 2.43, binutils 2.46, GDB 16.3, LLVM 22, Go 1.26, PHP 8.5, Ruby 4.0, Boost 1.90, CMake 4.0, Helm 4, Ansible 13, MariaDB 11.8, Django 6.x, TagLib 2, and TeX Live 2025.
On top of that, the distro adds the Nix package manager as a developer tool in the Fedora repositories. Of course, this does not make Fedora a Nix-based distribution, but it gives users easier access to Nix workflows directly from Fedora’s package set.
Package management continues its DNF5 transition with Fedora 44 moving PackageKit to the DNF5 backend. Additionally, this release drops QEMU 32-bit i686 host builds, following upstream QEMU’s deprecation of 32-bit host support.
Fedora Atomic desktops remove legacy pkla polkit compatibility, while FUSE 2 libraries are removed from Atomic desktop variants. These changes continue Fedora’s cleanup of older compatibility layers no longer needed by the default system.
Gaming and Wine users may also want to note Fedora 44’s NTSYNC support work. The NTSYNC kernel driver is intended to improve Windows compatibility workloads by providing a faster synchronization mechanism used by Wine and related gaming stacks.
The immutable Fedora (Atomic) editions also get similar desktop updates. Silverblue moves to GNOME 50, while Kinoite ships KDE Plasma 6.6 together with the new Plasma Login Manager and Plasma Setup experience. Budgie Atomic adds Budgie 10.10.2 with Wayland support, and COSMIC Atomic now ships COSMIC 1.0.8 as a stable desktop option. Plus, Fedora 44 removes FUSE 2 libraries from Atomic desktop images.
For more details, visit the release announcement. Fedora Linux 44 is available now from Fedora’s official website in Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, IoT, Cloud, CoreOS, Atomic desktop variants, and Fedora Spins.
