Fedora 44 Coming Soon

Based on the Fedora Project schedule and the Fedora package announce list, Fedora is on track for a Tuesday, April 14 earliest release date. If that date isn’t met, the primary release date is for Tuesday, April 21, one week later.

I’ve recently been seeing a large number of announcements about Fedora 44 on the Fedora package announcement list. Many of those announcements indicate that Fedora 44 packages have been successfully created. That’s typical activity near the end of each release cycle and is indicative of finalizing the hundreds of individual packages that make up a Fedora release.

Fedora 44 sports a number of new features and improvements. Here are a few of them.

• The Anaconda installer no longer creates default network profiles for all network interface cards (NICs). This prevents some post-install configuration issues for the networks.
• Introduces a KDE setup application that runs post-install and eliminates redundant steps.
• Adds the Plasma Login Manager (PLM) to replace the previous SDDM.
• Changes to the Games Lab include moving from Xfce to KDE Plasma on Wayland to take advantage of the Wayland graphics engine for gaming.
• The latest release of the Budgie desktop.
• Only the most recent release of the Go language will be installed, avoiding security issues and providing the latest features.
• MariaDB 11.8 will be the default.
• IBus 1.5.34 provides better support for Wayland.
• Ansible 13 adds greater security and resolves issues with breaking playbooks.
• Drop 32-bit QEMU host builds.

There are also improvements to Live Media.

• The aaarc64 Live ISO images now work with Windows on ARM (WoA) laptops.
• Live media now enables persistent overlays so data can be saved on the USB flash drives.

The Fedora 44 Beta is currently available. If you’re interested in trying the Fedora 44 Beta, you can download it here.