Fedora 44 Beta now available

Today, the Fedora Project is excited to announce that the beta version of Fedora Linux 44 - the latest version of the free and open source operating system - is now available. Learn more about the new and updated features of Fedora 44 Beta below and don’t forget to make sure that your system is fully up-to-date before upgrading from a previous release.

What’s new in Fedora 44 Beta?

Installer and desktop Improvements

Goodbye Anaconda created default network profiles: This change will impact how Anaconda populates network device profiles so that only devices configured during installation – by boot options, kickstart or interactively in UI – are made part of the final system install. This behavior change addresses some long standing issues caused by populating network profiles for all network devices that made it difficult to correctly reconfigure devices post-install.

Unified KDE out of the box experience: This change introduces the post-install Plasma Setup application for all Fedora KDE variants. The Anaconda configuration for variants making use of this new setup application will be adjusted to disable configuration stages that duplicate the functionality exposed in the setup application.

KDE Plasma Login Manager: This change introduced the Plasma Login Manager (PLM) for Fedora KDE variants instead of SDDM for the default login manager.

Reworked games lab: This change modernizes the games lab deliverable by leveraging the latest technologies to offer a high quality gaming and game development experience. This includes a change from Xfce to KDE Plasma to take advantage of the latest and greatest Wayland stack for gaming.

Budgie 10.10: Budgie 10.10 is the latest release of Budgie desktop. Budgie 10.10 migrates from X11 to Wayland, ensuring a viable long-term user experience for Fedora Budgie users and laying the groundwork for the next major Budgie release.

LiveCD Improvements

Automatic DTB selection for aarch64 EFI systems: This change intends to make the aarch64 Fedora Live ISO images work out of the box on Windows on ARM (WoA) laptops by automatically selecting the correct DTB at boot.

Modernize live media: This change modernizes the live media experience by switching to new live environment setup scripts provided by livesys-scripts and leverage new functionality in dracut to enable support for automatically enabling persistent overlays when flashed to USB sticks.

Upgrades and removals

Golang 1.26: Fedora users will receive the most current and recent Go release. Being close to upstream allows us to avoid security issues and provide more updated features. Consequently, Fedora can provide a reliable development platform for the Go language and projects written in it.

MariaDB 11.8 as distribution default version: The distribution default for MariaDB packaging will switch to 11.8. Multiple versions of the MariaDB packages will continue to be available. This change only impacts versioned packages presenting as an unversioned default.

IBus 1.5.34: Fedora users will benefit from better support of Wayland and emoji features.

Django 6.x: Fedora users can make use of the latest Django version. Users who use Django add-ons that are not ready for 6.0 should be able to switch it out for python3-django5.

TagLib 2: Fedora will be on the latest supported version of TagLib 2 and benefit from improvements in future minor releases with a simple update.

Helm 4: Helm 4 has been released upstream with intentional backwards-incompatible changes relative to Helm 3. To support a smooth transition for Fedora, this change introduces Helm 4 as the default helm package, while providing a parallel-installable Helm 3 package for users and tooling that still rely on Helm 3.

Ansible 13: This upgrade from Ansible 11 and Ansible Core 2.18 to Ansible 13 and Ansible Core 2.20 includes major robustness and security fixes to the templating engine.

TeXLive 2025: This is an upgrade to the latest version of TeXLive 2025. We also move to a modularized packaging system, which splits the TeXLive spec into a set of collection and scheme packages, reflecting TeXLive categorization. Each collection packages the immediate component dependencies as subpackages.

Drop QEMU 32-bit host builds: Fedora will stop building QEMU on i686 architecture. This change aligns Fedora with the QEMU upstream project’s decision to deprecate support for 32-bit host builds. Upstream intends to start removing 32-bit host build support code in a future release and will assume 64-bit atomic ops in all builds.

More information on the many great changes landing in Fedora Linux 44 can be found on the Change Set page.

What is a Fedora Beta release?

Fedora Beta releases are code-complete and will very closely resemble the final release. While the Fedora Project community will be testing this release intensely, we also want our end users to check and make sure that the features you care about are working as intended. The bugs you find and report help make your experience better as well as for millions of Fedora Linux users worldwide! Together, we can help not only make Fedora Linux stronger, but as these fixes and tweaks get pushed upstream to the kernel community, we can contribute to the betterment of the Linux ecosystem and free software holistically.

Let’s test Fedora 44 Beta together

Since this is a beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs or missing features. To report issues encountered during testing, contact the Fedora QA team via the test mailing list or in the #quality:fedoraproject.org channel on Fedora Chat (Matrix). As testing progresses, common issues are tracked in the “Common Issues” category on Ask Fedora.

For tips on reporting a bug effectively, read how to file a bug.