Fedora 44 released

 April 30, 2026

Three days ago, the Fedora project released Fedora 44. This release was delayed a couple of times due to an issue with the NVIDIA driver and installer. Since neither of those was relevant to me, I was not blocked by that. I appreciate that Fedora caters to many different kinds of users and use cases, and therefore, there might be delays for reasons that do not affect me.

I’ve used Fedora 44 on my laptop for months, but prefer stable versions for servers. The difference is due to the greater simplicity of rolling back on laptops compared to server systems. Since I use bootc on all my Fedora systems, it is enough to select the old version in grub if something goes wrong. But since the servers are headless, changing the grub selection might require finding a display and keyboard.

Among the many changes in Fedora 44, the one that excites me the most is Wayland becoming the only session installed by default, with the X11 session no longer shipped by default. X11 is still available in the repositories for those who need it, but removing it from the official artifact will help with dropping it from any usage in the long term. Having been involved in the Sway SIG and having used Wayland exclusively for over ten years, I think it was about time.

On the desktop side, Fedora 44 ships with GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6. GNOME 50 moves to a Vulkan-based renderer, which makes the interface noticeably smoother. KDE Plasma 6.6 introduces a new Login Manager and a post-install Plasma Setup application. Using Sway means these changes don’t affect me directly, but they’re significant for most Fedora desktop users.

Under the hood, Linux kernel 6.19 automatically loads the NTSYNC kernel module for Wine and gaming packages, which should make Windows application compatibility easier for people who need it. The developer toolchain has also been updated with GCC 16 prerelease, Go 1.26, Ruby 4.0, and Python 3.14. PackageKit now uses the DNF5 backend built on libdnf5, which brings us closer to completing the DNF5 transition.

Overall, I am pleased with Fedora 44, despite its slight delay.