Fedora 44 beta debuts with Linux 6.19 kernel, GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6 & installer updates

Fedora 44 beta is now available, bringing major updates to this well-known Linux distribution. This release is built on the Linux 6.19 kernel, and features the latest desktop environments, GNOME 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6. Alongside these system-wide improvements, Fedora KDE variants deliver a unified experience with the new post-install Plasma Setup application. They also transition to Plasma Login Manager as the default login interface, replacing SDDM.

Following the desktop changes, the Games Lab now uses KDE Plasma instead of Xfce, and benefits from the updated Wayland stack for an improved gaming and development environment. Budgie 10.10 desktop has also migrated from X11 to Wayland in this beta release.

For developers and maintainers, Fedora 44 beta offers an updated GNU Toolchain, reproducible package builds, Packit for dist-git continuous integration, removal of python-mock, new R packaging guidelines, the Nix package manager as an added developer tool, and default hardlinking of identical files within packages. Numerous packages have also been updated, including MariaDB 11.8, IBus 1.5.34, Golang 1.26, Django 6.x, TagLib 2, Helm 4, Ansible 13, and TeXLive 2025.

The installer, Anaconda, now only adds network device profiles that the user configures during installation, addressing recurring network setup issues. Additionally, the release drops QEMU support for 32-bit hosts, removes FUSE 2 binaries from Atomic desktops, and ends support for deprecated pkla polkit rules. Users will also find LiveCD improvements and other minor enhancements and bug fixes in this beta release.