The Fedora Project has released Fedora Linux 44, the new stable version of one of the most influential distributions in the GNU/Linux world. It became official on April 28, 2026, a few days behind the planned date because the team wanted to nail down system stability before signing off.
Fedora 44 ships with the Linux 6.19 kernel (version 6.19.14-300.fc44 in the initial image), which improves hardware support and adds new kernel tweaks. The Workstation edition runs GNOME 50, with a long list of desktop refinements that touch everything from accessibility to color management and remote desktop. The KDE Plasma Desktop edition debuts KDE Plasma 6.6, bringing the new Plasma Login Manager and a simpler setup so things fit together better from the first boot.
On the technical side, MariaDB 11.8 becomes the default database management system, and the Wine NTSYNC kernel module is now enabled, which improves compatibility and performance quite a bit when running Windows applications. There are also OpenSSL improvements through directory-hash support for ca-certificates, and Fedora Cloud now uses a Btrfs subvolume for the /boot partition to save space. The Anaconda installer now creates network profiles only for the devices that are actually configured.
As always, Fedora 44 comes in several editions to cover different kinds of users: Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, Cloud, CoreOS, IoT and the Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, Cosmic, Budgie and Sway), plus alternate spins with Cinnamon and Xfce.
Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and maintained by a large community, and it’s well known for picking up the latest free software technologies early. It’s the foundation that later shapes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which makes it a great fit for developers, system administrators and power users who want to stay ahead.
You can find all the details, lifecycle information and download links on the Fedora page at LinuxGratis.
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