Fedora Linux 44 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New

posted by Marius Nestor on Apr 28, 2026,
updated May 13, 2026

Powered by the Linux 6.19 kernel series, the Fedora Linux 44 release ships with the latest and greatest GNOME 50 desktop environment for the flagship Fedora Workstation edition, as well as the latest KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop environment for the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop edition, which defaults to the Plasma Login Manager display manager.

Some highlights of Fedora Linux 44 include automatic DTB selection for AArch64 (ARM64) EFI systems, support for automatically enabling persistent overlays when flashed to USB sticks, support for the Nix package manager, and support for the DNF5 backend on PackageKit.

Read on

Fedora People:

• What’s New for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora Linux 44 - Fedora Magazine

  We have moved the cross-variants issue tracker to the new Fedora forge. This is the best place to file issues that impacts all variants or to coordinate work between all of them. If you have issues specific to a given desktop environment then we usually prefer to track them in each respective SIG trackers. These are available on the README for the atomic-desktops organization.

  The unified documentation for all Atomic Desktops is finally live! Unfortunately the translations have not been migrated so we will need help to re-translate everything again, once the translation setup is ready with the new forge. It should be mostly copy/paste from the previous docs and this time we will only have to translate the docs once and not for every (new) variant.

• How to Rebase to Fedora Linux 44 on Silverblue - Fedora Magazine

  Fedora Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. If you want to rebase to Fedora Linux 44 on your Fedora Silverblue system, this article tells you how. It not only shows you what to do, but also how to revert things if something unforeseen happens.

• What's New in Fedora Workstation 44 - Fedora Magazine

  Fedora Linux 44 Workstation ships with the latest GNOME release, GNOME 50. This comes with a long list of refinements to your desktop, including everything from accessibility, to color management and remote desktop.

  As part of the Digital Wellbeing initiative, new native Parental Controls let you set screen time limits and bedtimes directly from Settings.

  Many of the applications that are installed by default on the Fedora Workstation have also seen improvements, from the Document Viewer to the File Manager and the Calendar.

• The Fedora Linux 44 Release is Here! - Fedora Magazine

  I’m excited to announce that Fedora Linux 44 is here! Keep reading to discover highlights of Fedora Linux 44, or if you are ready, just jump right in and give Fedora Linux 44 a try!

  Thank you and congrats to everyone who has contributed to this release. And thanks to everyone who showed up for the virtual release party last Friday. We celebrated a little early this year, just after the go/no-go meeting made the release official. If you weren’t able to join us live, you can watch the recording and hear about some of the great work from the contributors involved.

• Fedora Asahi Remix 44 is now available - Fedora Magazine

  We are happy to announce the general availability of Fedora Asahi Remix 44. This release brings Fedora Linux 44 to Apple Silicon Macs.

  Fedora Asahi Remix is developed in close collaboration with the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project. This release incorporates all of the exciting improvements brought by Fedora Linux 44. Fedora Asahi Remix 44 also retires our vendored Mesa and virglrenderer packages. Users who have not already manually done so will be automatically transitioned to the upstream Mesa and virglrenderer packages provided by the upstream Fedora repositories.

  Fedora Asahi Remix offers KDE Plasma 6.6 as our flagship desktop experience, with all of the new and exciting features brought by Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44. Plasma Setup replaces the previous Calamares-based setup wizard, providing a Plasma-native experience for user account creation and system setup. Additionally, Plasma Login Manager is now the default greeter and session manager, replacing SDDM. This applies to new installs only; users upgrading from previous versions of Fedora Asahi Remix will not have their configuration changed.

A Lot More:

• After 2 Weeks of Delay, Fedora 44 is Finally Here!

  The Fedora Project has had an interesting journey since its inception in November 2003. It started as a community-backed effort spun off from Red Hat Linux, which Red Hat had decided to retire in favor of its commercial Enterprise Linux product.

  Rather than leave the community without a home, Red Hat partnered with contributors to launch Fedora as an open, community-driven distribution that would push new technologies forward.

  That upstream-first philosophy has held ever since. Fedora consistently ships things before most other distributions dare to, from Wayland adoption to newer compiler toolchains, often serving as the real-world test bed for what eventually becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  Of course it is not limited to that; its various flavors serve all kinds of users, starting from desktop users to server administrators, hobbyist tinkerers, and anyone running containerized workloads at scale.

• What’s new for Fedora Atomic Desktops in Fedora 44 - Siosm’s blog

  Fedora 44 has been released! So let’s see what is included in this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic).

  Note: You can also read this post on the Fedora Magazine.

• Sealed Fedora Atomic Desktop bootable container images - Siosm’s blog

  I’m happy to announce that we have sealed bootable container images ready for testing for the Fedora Atomic Desktops!

  Note: You can also read this post on the Fedora Magazine.

• Announcing Fedora 44

  Today, the Fedora Project is excited to announce the general availability of Fedora Linux 44, the latest version of the free and open source operating system. Learn more about the new and updated features of Fedora 44 below and don’t forget to ensure your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release.

• Fedora Linux 44 has been released

  The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are "what's new" articles for Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs, based on Fedora 44, is also available. See the Fedora Spins page for a full list of alternative desktop options.

More Updates:

• What’s New in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 - Fedora Magazine

  Fedora has released Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition 44 to the public.

  The Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition is suitable for many needs. It combines the reliable and trusted Fedora Linux base with the KDE Plasma Desktop environment. It provides a selection of KDE applications that are simple by default, but powerful when needed.

• Fedora Linux 44 Launches With Gnome 50, KDE Plasma 6.6 | TechPowerUp Forums

  Just on time, according to the recent launch date announcement, Fedora 44 has officially left the gates, with both Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 and Fedora Linux 44 Workstation (with Gnome), seeing significant user-facing and behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest changes come by way of the addition of Gnome 50 on Fedora Workstation and KDE Plasma 6.6 on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44. Both versions can now be downloaded from the Fedora website, and existing users can perform in-place upgrades following the official guidance. The full Fedora Linux 44 patch notes are available here.

  While Gnome 50 and KDE 6.6 both feature neat UI tweaks, bug fixes, and accessibility and performance improvements, Fedora Linux itself also saw a few notable changes. For starters, Fedora 44 now includes the NTSync driver, and it is enabled by default, enabling some impressive performance and stability improvements in certain games and with the most recent Proton and Wine versions, as we covered previously. All Fedora KDE versions will now all use the same out-of-the-box experience, making initial setup feel more familiar and enabling hardware vendors to sell hardware with Fedora KDE pre-installed with a proper user greeting and setup wizard. Fedora Atomic Desktops have also dropped FUSE2 library support, which may be of import to some users using AppImage applications. Both Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop use Wayland by default, but in the case of Fedora Workstation, Gnome 50 no longer includes any code for X11 compatibility. X11 can still be installed, but it is not officially supported and may result in issues. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 also switches to KDE Plasma Login Manager by default, which may be unfamiliar to some users and may actually have fewer features.

A couple more:

• Distro Watch ☛ Distribution Release: Fedora 44

  The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 44. The new version of the experimental distribution introduces changes to the system installer, updates the Workstation desktop environments to GNOME 50 and Plasma 6.6, and improves OpenSSL certificate file handling. [...]

• OSTechNix ☛ How to Upgrade to Fedora 44 From Fedora 43 Step-by-Step

  Fedora Linux 44 is now available for download as of April 28, 2026. This release includes significant updates like the transition of the Budgie desktop to Wayland and a goal of 99% reproducible package builds. If you currently run Fedora 43, you can upgrade to the new Fedora Linux 44 version without re-installation as described in the following steps.

GamingOnLinux:

• Fedora Linux 44 is out now as one of the best Linux distributions | GamingOnLinux

  Fedora Linux 44 is officially here and with it tons of new features across different spins, continuing to be one of the best Linux distributions. For now, I still stand by recommendation of Fedora KDE as the best Linux distribution for gaming in 2026. And now, even more so!

The Register:

• Fedora 44 is out – countless versions of it

  Fedora Linux 44 has arrived – in multiple formats and for several CPU families, including some new container formats and storage options.

  The Fedora Project is the community-led Linux distro that is upstream of Red Hat's CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and of course third-party distros such as Alma Linux and Rocky Linux). This means that in the extensive Red Hat family of Linux distros, Fedora is the leading, or indeed bleeding edge. Fedora is where new technology, tooling, and methods get tried out and refined, and the rough edges smoothed off, before they potentially make their way downstream into the much smaller and more restricted enterprise distros.

  Compared to the more widely used Debian and Ubuntu families, and their many offshoots and derivatives, this makes Fedora a very different proposition.

  Fedora doesn't have to worry about "stable" or "long-term support" releases. It doesn't have them, because those things happen in other products: its downstream distributions. There's a new Fedora version twice a year, and each version only gets a year of updates. You're supposed to upgrade to a new version at least annually – in other words, every alternate release. This means the project is free to include newer versions of its tens of thousands of sub-components, and indeed, major components often get upgraded to new versions during each Fedora release's six months as the current version.

TechPowerUp:

• Fedora Linux 44 Launches With Gnome 50, KDE Plasma 6.6 | TechPowerUp

  Just on time, according to the recent launch date announcement, Fedora 44 has officially left the gates, with both Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 and Fedora Linux 44 Workstation (with Gnome), seeing significant user-facing and behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest changes come by way of the addition of Gnome 50 on Fedora Workstation and KDE Plasma 6.6 on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44. Both versions can now be downloaded from the Fedora website, and existing users can perform in-place upgrades following the official guidance. The full Fedora Linux 44 patch notes are available here.

  While Gnome 50 and KDE 6.6 both feature neat UI tweaks, bug fixes, and accessibility and performance improvements, Fedora Linux itself also saw a few notable changes. For starters, Fedora 44 now includes the NTSync driver, and it is enabled by default, enabling some impressive performance and stability improvements in certain games and with the most recent Proton and Wine versions, as we covered previously. All Fedora KDE versions will now all use the same out-of-the-box experience, making initial setup feel more familiar and enabling hardware vendors to sell hardware with Fedora KDE pre-installed with a proper user greeting and setup wizard. Fedora Atomic Desktops have also dropped FUSE2 library support, which may be of import to some users using AppImage applications. Both Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop use Wayland by default, but in the case of Fedora Workstation, Gnome 50 no longer includes any code for X11 compatibility. X11 can still be installed, but it is not officially supported and may result in issues. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 also switches to KDE Plasma Login Manager by default, which may be unfamiliar to some users and may actually have fewer features.

Bazzite also:

• Distro Watch ☛ Distribution Release: Bazzite 44

  Kyle Gospodnetich has announced the release of Bazzite 44, a major update of the project's Fedora-based immutable distribution with atomic updates and an integrated Steam client, designed primarily for Linux gamers. The new version synchronises the Bazzite system and packages with the just-release Fedora 44: [...]

• OSTechNix ☛ Fedora Linux 44 Released: GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and DNF5

  Fedora Linux 44 is officially released with better software and hardware support among other improvements. Fedora 44 focuses on Wayland-native modernisations, technical reliability, and developer empowerment. Key updates include the migration of the Budgie desktop to Wayland, a shift for the Games Lab to KDE Plasma, the introduction of the Nix package manager, and more. If you're already using Fedora 43, you can directly upgrade to Fedora Linux 44 without re-installation. For those who prefer fresh installation, the Fedora 44 ISO images are also available for the Workstation, Server, IoT, and Cloud editions.

More on Bazzite:

• Bazzite Linux 44 lands for desktop gamers and it's a big release | GamingOnLinux

  Bazzite Linux 44 has landed now that Fedora 44 has been released, and with it plenty of nice changes for gamers wanting a good Linux distribution.

FOSS Force:

• Fedora 44 Brings GNOME 50, KDE 6.6, and Better Gaming (With Screenshots) - FOSS Force

  Fedora 44 has introduced several significant updates and enhancements across its desktop environments and core functionalities. First, on the Workstation edition of the distro, Gnome 50 is the desktop environment, which offers refinements in accessibility, color management, and remote desktop capabilities. The KDE edition also gets an upgrade to KDE Plasma 6.6, providing a unified experience with a new Plasma Login Manager and other desktop enhancements.

  While Gnome and KDE are just two of the desktop environments that grace Fedora 44, the Fedora Project provides users a number of desktop and window manager “spins,” including –take a deep breath — Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate-Compiz, i3, LXQt, LXDE, SOAS (also known as Sugar on a Stick, the desktop for the One Laptop Per Child computers), Sway, Budgie, Miracle, and Cosmic.

ZDNet:

• Fedora 44 made me forget I was using Linux - in the best way | ZDNET

  Ah, Fedora Linux. I've used, abused, tested, and loved it for a long, long time. With each iteration, this open-source operating system has improved on its previous outings, sometimes with small steps and other times with great strides. There have been releases that showed remarkable improvement, while others only moved the needle the slightest bit.

  Fedora 44 falls somewhere in between, while at the same time taking Linux to new heights.

  Let's talk about this latest release.

• Fedora coverage from Arindam

  • DebugPoint ☛ Upgrade to Fedora 44 from Fedora 43 Workstation (GUI and CLI)

    Here’s are the quick steps on how you can upgrade to the Fedora 44 version. Fedora 44 is officially available for download and the upgrade channels are now available. This release brings the latest and greatest GNOME 50 desktop for workstation editions, refinements to KDE Plasma desktop and more updates.

Linux Magazine:

• Fedora 44 Now Gaming Ready » Linux Magazine

  I never thought I'd consider Fedora a solid gaming platform, but with the release of the latest iteration (version 44), the developers have enabled the NTSYNC kernel module. NTSYNC enables high-performance emulation of Windows NT synchronization primitives, which are used to manage thread interaction, protect shared resources, and prevent race conditions by signaling when threads can proceed. This new addition vastly improves gaming performance with Wine and Proton by moving synchronization to userspace tools like fsync and esync.

  With the help of NTSYNC, you might see anywhere from 40-200 percent frames per second (FPS) gains! That's impressive.

  As well, you'll get kernel 6.19, Gnome 50 (or KDE Plasma 6.6, if you go the Fedora KDE route), support for the Nix package manager, DNF5 support for PackageKit, and (finally) the Fedora Miracle spin gets the Dank Material Shell, which means the Miracle Window Manager should be working properly again (huzzah!).

  Of course, there's an updated toolchain kit, including GCC 16.1, GNU binutils 2.46, and on and on and on.