Fedora Linux 44 Released - GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, DNF5 and Linux 6.19 Land Today After Two Slips (April 2026)

The Fedora Project on April 28, 2026 shipped the final release of Fedora Linux 44, a fortnight after its original April 14 target after two slips driven by last-minute blocker bugs. The build that ships, RC-1.7, includes Firefox 150 (which patches more than 200 security issues) and a critical PackageKit fix that closed a privilege-escalation flaw, alongside headline upgrades to GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and the Linux 6.19 kernel.

What Happened

Fedora's release engineering team voted "Go" for Fedora Linux 44 at the final Go/No-Go meeting on April 23, 2026, after development, QA, and engineering signed off that all release-blocking bugs had been resolved. The release date had originally been set for April 14, was first slipped to April 21 over remaining blockers, and was then pushed one more week to April 28 after RC-1.6 failed to clear validation.

The final image, RC-1.7, was approved as identical to what shipped today, and ISOs were quietly seeded to mirrors over the weekend so users could begin downloading before the formal announcement. Mark Christian, on behalf of the Fedora release engineering team, posted the "F44 Final is GO" bulletin to the fedora-devel-announce mailing list on April 23.

Key Details

• Linux 6.19 kernel — first mainline Fedora release on the 6.19 series, with improved Intel Lunar Lake/Arrow Lake graphics, AMD Strix Halo support, and Rust-for-Linux improvements.
• GNOME 50 — default on Fedora Workstation, with end of X11 session support, better variable refresh rate (VRR), and refreshed HiDPI handling.
• KDE Plasma 6.6 — default on Fedora KDE, with the Plasma Login Manager replacing SDDM as the default greeter on every KDE-based variant.
• DNF5 backend in PackageKit — PackageKit (used by GNOME Software) now drives DNF5 directly for faster, more consistent package operations.
• Python 3.14 as the default system Python; Budgie 10.10 on the Budgie Spin; automatic DTB selection for AArch64 EFI systems.
• Firefox 150 with 200+ security fixes and a PackageKit local-privilege-escalation patch in RC-1.7 forced a final image rebuild before release.
• Asahi Linux integration — Fedora Asahi Remix 44 ships in lockstep, adding Apple M3 alpha support, ProMotion VRR, and approximately 20% idle power savings on supported MacBooks.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

On r/Fedora and r/linux, reaction is overwhelmingly positive: long threads praise the Plasma 6.6 polish on KDE spin, the speed-up from DNF5 in GNOME Software, and the fact that the Asahi Remix is finally a same-day release rather than a six-week-late catch-up. The most common complaint is the loss of X11 session support in GNOME 50 — users with NVIDIA prime-render setups or proprietary applications still tied to X11 are reporting they will hold on Fedora 43 (which remains supported) or move to Fedora KDE Plasma, where an X11 session is still available.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reported that Fedora 44's installer experience is "smoother than any Fedora release in recent memory" and benchmarked early KDE-spin power savings on AMD Ryzen 9 systems at 6–9% over Fedora 43.

What This Means for Developers

For developers, the most consequential shift is the Python 3.14 default: any package or script that pinned to 3.13 in CI will need a rebuild, and a small number of C extensions still tagged for 3.13 ABI will need recompilation. The DNF5 backend change matters too — third-party tooling that shells out to DNF should be tested against DNF5's slightly stricter argument parsing (--allowerasing behaviour and exit codes have changed in subtle ways). Wayland-only GNOME means that any developer testing electron or Chromium-based tooling under X11 will have to either install Fedora KDE or run an Xwayland session.

Fedora 44 will be supported until roughly mid-2027 on the standard ~13-month lifecycle. Fedora 42 reaches end-of-life on the day Fedora 44 ships; Fedora 43 stays supported until Fedora 45 plus four weeks.

What's Next

Upgrade paths from Fedora 43 are immediately available via sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=44 followed by dnf system-upgrade reboot. Cloud and container images are live on the Fedora mirror network, with new official AMIs on AWS and OCI images on Quay landing throughout the day. Fedora's next development cycle, F45, opens its branch immediately, with target features including a stricter Bootupd-by-default, expanded Rust-in-coreutils experimentation, and Toolbx 0.2.0 as the default container dev workflow.

Sources

• Fedora Project — official downloads and release notes for Fedora Linux 44.
• Fedora Magazine: Announcing Fedora Linux 44 Beta — original beta announcement.
• Phoronix: Fedora 44 Releasing Next Week — technical preview and benchmarks.
• OSTechNix: Fedora 44 Release Date Confirmed — coverage of the second slip and Go decision.
• Linuxiac: Fedora 44 Faces Second Release Delay — reporting on the blocker bugs that pushed the release.
• warp2search: Fedora Linux 44 Final Approved — April 28 Release — details of the RC-1.7 build and security fixes.