Fedora Linux 44 Beta is now available, giving Linux users an early look at what the next version of the distribution will bring. As always, the beta is meant for testing rather than daily production use. The Fedora Project is asking the community to download it, poke around, and report any bugs before the final release arrives.
Those interested can grab Fedora Linux 44 Beta in several flavors, such as Fedora Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, and more. Existing users can also upgrade using the DNF system-upgrade command instead of reinstalling from scratch.
One of the more noticeable changes lands in the KDE editions. Fedora KDE variants are replacing the long-standing SDDM login manager with the Plasma Login Manager. KDE installs also gain a new post-install Plasma Setup tool meant to streamline configuration after installation.
Gamers and experimenters may notice a refresh to Fedora’s Games Lab as well. It now moves from Xfce to KDE Plasma to better take advantage of the modern Wayland graphics stack. Wayland continues to spread across Fedora, and Budgie 10.10 joins that shift by migrating from X11 to Wayland too.
The installer sees a behavior tweak that should make life easier after installation. The Anaconda installer will no longer create network profiles for every detected interface. Instead, it only creates profiles for devices actually configured during setup, which should make later reconfiguration less messy.
Fedora Linux 44 Beta also updates its live media environment. The project has modernized the live system scripts and added support for automatic persistent overlays when the operating system is written to a USB drive. In plain English, that means portable Fedora installations should behave more predictably when booted from a flash drive.
Under the hood, Fedora keeps pushing toward cleaner and more transparent builds. The distribution continues its work toward reproducible packages, with the project already reporting around 90 percent reproducibility and aiming for at least 99 percent by the final Fedora 44 release.
The GNU toolchain has also been updated again, bringing newer versions of gcc, glibc, binutils, and gdb. Fedora developers are also moving ahead with Packit as the default CI system for Fedora dist-git repositories.
Another interesting addition is the Nix package manager as a developer tool. Fedora is not replacing its traditional RPM ecosystem, but developers who prefer Nix workflows will now have the option available directly in the repositories.
Several major packages also get updates. Fedora Linux 44 Beta includes Golang 1.26, MariaDB 11.8 as the default database version, Django 6.x, Helm 4 with a parallel-installable helm3 package for compatibility, Ansible 13, and TeXLive 2025.
Some older pieces are being trimmed as well. Fedora is dropping QEMU builds for 32-bit host systems, following upstream plans to remove support. Atomic desktops are also removing FUSE 2 libraries and deprecated pkla polkit rules.
ARM hardware also gets a small but useful improvement. Fedora Live ISO images for aarch64 systems now automatically select the correct device tree when booting, which should improve compatibility with Windows-on-ARM laptops.
Fedora Linux 44 Beta is available now for anyone curious enough to test it. Just remember, it is a beta. If something breaks, well… that is kind of the point.
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Great to see the progress. Interesting that Fedora is moving towards KDE Plasma.