Fedora Linux 44 Launches With Gnome 50, KDE Plasma 6.6

Just on time, according to the recent launch date announcement, Fedora 44 has officially left the gates, with both Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 and Fedora Linux 44 Workstation (with Gnome), seeing significant user-facing and behind-the-scenes updates. The biggest changes come by way of the addition of Gnome 50 on Fedora Workstation and KDE Plasma 6.6 on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44. Both versions can now be downloaded from the Fedora website, and existing users can perform in-place upgrades following the official guidance. The full Fedora Linux 44 patch notes are available here.

While Gnome 50 and KDE 6.6 both feature neat UI tweaks, bug fixes, and accessibility and performance improvements, Fedora Linux itself also saw a few notable changes. For starters, Fedora 44 now includes the NTSync driver, and it is enabled by default, enabling some impressive performance and stability improvements in certain games and with the most recent Proton and Wine versions, as we covered previously. All Fedora KDE versions will now all use the same out-of-the-box experience, making initial setup feel more familiar and enabling hardware vendors to sell hardware with Fedora KDE pre-installed with a proper user greeting and setup wizard. Fedora Atomic Desktops have also dropped FUSE2 library support, which may be of import to some users using AppImage applications. Both Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop use Wayland by default, but in the case of Fedora Workstation, Gnome 50 no longer includes any code for X11 compatibility. X11 can still be installed, but it is not officially supported and may result in issues. Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 also switches to KDE Plasma Login Manager by default, which may be unfamiliar to some users and may actually have fewer features.