The release of Fedora Linux 44 has been announced. Products for download include Fedora Workstation, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, Fedora Server, Fedora IoT, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Cloud Base, Fedora IoT Edition, Fedora Silverblue, Fedora Kinoite, and Live builds provided as spins with custom environments like Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, Phosh, Miracle, LXQt, Budgie, Sway, and Cosmic. Builds are created for x86_64, Power64, and ARM64 (AArch64) architectures.
The most significant changes in Fedora Linux 44:
- The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 50, which removes the code for X11 support, implements a new session saving system, redesigns the parental control interface, improves support for fractional scaling levels, and adds support for the Wayland color-management-v2 protocol for color management.
- In all versions of the distribution with the KDE desktop environment (Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile Spin, and Fedora Kinoite), the Plasma Setup initial setup wizard developed by KDE is used for system configuration after installation, while overlapping stages in the Anaconda installer have been disabled.
- In all KDE editions, the login manager SDDM has been replaced with the Plasma Login Manager, which is a project developed by KDE.
- The Fedora Games Lab edition has been revamped, providing a curated selection of packages and settings for gaming enthusiasts. The new version updated the software stack for running games and incorporated current technologies such as Wayland and PipeWire.
- The Budgie desktop environment has been updated to version 10.10, now migrated to Wayland.
- The logic for creating network profiles (files with settings for NetworkManager) in the installed system has been changed in the Anaconda installer. Such profiles are now created only for devices configured during installation via GUI, boot options, or a kickstart file, rather than for all available wired network devices. Creating profiles for all available devices rather than just those selected by the user required deleting unnecessary profiles after installation and caused difficulties when subsequent changes to settings were needed.
- The NTSYNC kernel module is enabled by default, significantly improving the performance of Windows games run through Wine. This module implements the symbolic device /dev/ntsync and a set of synchronization primitives used in the Windows NT kernel. A substantial performance boost is achieved by eliminating the overhead associated with using RPC in user space.
- On Aarch64 architecture systems, automatic selection of the Device Tree Blobs (DTB) configuration file for the UEFI bootloader has been implemented, resolving boot issues with Live Fedora builds on ARM laptops shipped with Windows.
- Live builds utilize the livesys-scripts set for configuring the working environment and new Dracut tool capabilities for automatically creating a persistent overlay storage when writing the image to USB drives.
- Work continues on converting the continuous integration (dist-git CI) infrastructure, which rebuilds RPM packages after changes or version updates, to use the Packit tool by default instead of Fedora CI and Zuul.
- Hard links for linking identical files installed from different packages in the /usr hierarchy are now enabled by default. A hard link is automatically created when the package is installed by the handler during the 'post install' stage.
- The repository has added a package manager tool Nix, allowing installation of packages in Nix format from the nixpkgs collection. Packages can be installed in both single-user (in the user's home directory) and multi-user (in the /nix directory) modes.
- The delivery of QEMU builds for 32-bit host systems (i686) has been discontinued.
This change reflects QEMU's project work to remove support for 32-bit host systems. - Executable files and libraries of FUSE 2 have been removed from the atomic edits of Fedora for desktop systems (previously, this version was declared obsolete and all packages were migrated to using FUSE 3).
Support for obsolete polkit rules supplied in files with the .pkla extension has also been discontinued. - PackageKit has switched to using the new DNF5 backend, built with the libdnf5 library.
- In the distribution edition with the composite manager MiracleWM, the desktop shell nwg-shell has been replaced with Dank Material Shell.
- In Fedora Cloud, instead of a separate /boot partition, a corresponding Btrfs subvolume is now offered.
- The package libreoffice-KF5 with components for integrating LibreOffice with Qt5 has been discontinued, and the libreoffice-kf6 package has replaced it, providing integration with Qt6.
- The loading of the OpenSSL library has been accelerated by distributing certificates across subdirectories (directory-hash format) instead of placing them in a single file /etc/pki/tls/cert.pem.
- Versions of the following packages have been updated: GCC 16.1-prerelease, LLVM 22, Ruby 4.0, Go 1.26, binutils 2.46, glibc 2.43, gdb 16.3, CMake 4.0, MariaDB 11.8, IBus 1.5.34, uutils-coreutils 0.5, nushell 0.109.2, Django 6.x, TagLib 2, Helm 4, Ansible 13, TeXLive 2025, GHC 9.10, PHP 8.5.
- Efforts have been made to bring the infrastructure for reproducible builds to cover at least 99% of the packages in the Fedora repository. In previous releases, the coverage for reproducible builds was estimated at 90%, thanks to changes in the build system that synchronize metadata about file modification times with the reference source code, as well as ensuring a consistent order of metadata and structures in binary files. To ensure reproducible builds in the remaining 10%, maintainers of problematic packages were involved. Reproducible builds allow users to verify that binaries distributed in packages are built from the provided source code and do not contain hidden changes resulting from compiler or build toolchain compromises.
For Fedora 44, the 'free' and 'nonfree' repositories from the RPM Fusion project have been integrated, offering packages with additional multimedia applications (MPlayer, VLC, Xine), video/audio codecs, DVD support, proprietary AMD and NVIDIA drivers, gaming applications, and emulators.
Source: opennet.ru
