Fedora 44 lands with GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and much more

Fedora keeps moving with version 44, which landed less than a day ago. This new version comes with plenty of changes for all user categories, including programmers and system administrators, but the average Joe can also enjoy quite a few improvements, both under the hood and on the surface. Obviously, the update also impacts alternate desktop options, the Atomic Desktops, and even the version targeting Apple hardware, namely Asahi Remix.

These are some of the highlights of various Fedora 44 flavors, with some changes affecting all of them:

• The Nix package tool.
• Updates to the Anaconda installer and related components.
• Safer and more reliable bootloader in all environments.
• Stratis 3.9.0, featuring online encryption, decryption, and reencryption. It now allows starting a pool without its cache.
• GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6.
• The NTSYNC kernel module is now enabled by default for Win and Steam (RPM Fusion) packages.
• Budgie 10.10.
• LLVM 22.
• GNU toolchain update, including gcc 16.1, binutils 2.46, glibc 2.43, and gdb 16.3.
• Django 6.0.

To run properly, Fedora 44 needs a 2 GHz quad-core processor alongside 4/20 GB of system memory/drive space. However, the less demanding spins can run smoothly on 2 GHz dual-core processors paired with 2 GB of memory and 15 GB of drive space.

Those who want to take a closer look at all the changes can check out this page. The downloads can be found on the official website (Get Fedora, in the upper right), where there's plenty for everyone, including virtual machine images and a version made for IoT hardware.