Fedora 44 arrived this week. These are the biggest changes and how to get them
Fedora on ARM? It's more attainable now.
The Fedora Linux community announced the release of Fedora 44 with a lot of fanfare. These are the biggest changes to expect as you upgrade.
Why this update matters: It followed on the heels of Ubuntu 26.04's release last week, and, along with Ubuntu, Fedora is one of the most popular, influential, and long-standing Linux distributions in existence.
What's new
New processor support
Fedora 44 works out of the box on Windows on ARM laptops that use the Snapdragon X series of chips. It's able to do this thanks to new automatic DTB selection on AArch64 EFI systems
GNOME 50 in Workstation
Fedora Workstation is now packaged with GNOME 50, which brings with it new parental controls that let you set screen time limits, plus an improved screen reader with automatic language switching. GNOME's Document Viewer has new annotation tools like highlighting and text input, and the Calendar app can now export ICS files.
Read more in the official GNOME 50 release notes.
Plasma in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop
The flagship KDE edition of Fedora 44 ships with Plasma 6.6, which brings improvements like text recognition in screenshots, custom global theme creation, and a new virtual keyboard. The installation and login experience has been improved, which makes it easy to set up user accounts for family members sharing your Fedora device.
You can read more at the official Plasma 6.6 announcement.
What's getting better
Atomic desktops
Many of the same upgrades to GNOME, KDE, and other software on Fedora 44 also apply to Fedora atomic desktops like Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, and more. There's a new unified documentation center for all atomic desktops, and you can now test "sealed" Fedora atomic desktops which provide enhanced security via the TPM.
Jordan Gloor
Running Windows apps on Fedora
When software tries to run Windows apps that benefit from the NTSYNC module that was added to the kernel about a year ago, Fedora now automatically configures and optimizes the module for your system. That makes using tools like Wine and Proton a lot simpler.
Network configuration at installation
Now when you first install Fedora, a custom network configuration gets created for each device you configure, and it's preserved so that you have to do less work post-installation.
What's going away
Support for certain AppImages in atomic desktops
Because the FUSE 2 libraries have been removed from atomic desktop images, some AppImages that were still relying on those libraries will no longer work. If your AppImages fail to launch because of missing FUSE 2 libraries, you'll have to either ask the maintainer to to upgrade to a newer runtime or install the app in a different format.
Zooming out
What people are saying: Judging by the Reddit discussions I read, Fedora 44 is being well-received, though some people are having issues with logging in after upgrading, on Fedora Workstation in particular. Until those issues are worked out, I recommend being extra sure your backups are working.
My take: When I tried Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop in the past, I wasn't impressed. I'm content with CachyOS for the moment, but I'm glad to see more work being done in enabling better Linux operation on specialized hardware like Windows on ARM PCs.
Diving in
The fineprint: There was more that didn't fit in this article, so check the official release announcement for more and let me know if you find something interesting I missed.
Get it now: To get a fresh copy of Fedora 44, head to the Fedora Project download page. If you want to upgrade from Fedora 43 (after backing up!), then look for the update option in your distro's software update manager. Note that Fedora does not recommend forcing an upgrade via the command line.
On atomic desktops, though, you can force an upgrade by running rpm-ostree upgrade to make sure you're up to date, then get your branch name with these commands:
source /etc/os-release
ostree remote refs ${ID} | grep $(arch) | grep ${VARIANT_ID}After that, you're ready to upgrade with the command rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/44/x86_64/silverblue, replacing silverblue with your branch name.
Holding off the upgrade? You can stay on Fedora 43 until it reaches end-of-life this December. Those still running Fedora 42 face end-of-life within weeks, on May 13.
