New sealed bootable container images and Stratis storage, too
Fedora Linux 44 has arrived – in multiple formats and for several CPU families, including some new container formats and storage options.
The Fedora Project is the community-led Linux distro that is upstream of Red Hat's CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and of course third-party distros such as Alma Linux and Rocky Linux). This means that in the extensive Red Hat family of Linux distros, Fedora is the leading, or indeed bleeding edge. Fedora is where new technology, tooling, and methods get tried out and refined, and the rough edges smoothed off, before they potentially make their way downstream into the much smaller and more restricted enterprise distros.
Compared to the more widely used Debian and Ubuntu families, and their many offshoots and derivatives, this makes Fedora a very different proposition.
Fedora doesn't have to worry about "stable" or "long-term support" releases. It doesn't have them, because those things happen in other products: its downstream distributions. There's a new Fedora version twice a year, and each version only gets a year of updates. You're supposed to upgrade to a new version at least annually – in other words, every alternate release. This means the project is free to include newer versions of its tens of thousands of sub-components, and indeed, major components often get upgraded to new versions during each Fedora release's six months as the current version.
In Ubuntu terms, every Fedora release is an interim release. Red Hat's equivalent of Debian or an Ubuntu LTS release is RHEL, and the company hopes you'll pay for that stability. If you don't want to, there are free third-party rebuilds, which the Reg FOSS desk refers to as the RHELatives, such as Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, and Oracle Linux.
So, freed from any need to support them for years to come, Fedora offers whole fields of fun FOSS freshness in which to frolic. Most, but not all, of its components tend to be newer versions than Canonical gives you. Both Ubuntu and Fedora offer GNOME as their default desktop – indeed, many GNOME developers work at Red Hat – and so the release cycles of both distros follow GNOME's semi-annual releases.
What's new
On the desktop, between the official Editions and the Spins, Fedora 44 offers many of the same versions of the same environments as last week's Ubuntu 26.04. So, for example, the flagship Fedora Workstation uses GNOME 50, and that means it's Wayland-only, with no X.org session available.
Similarly, the KDE edition uses Plasma 6.6, complete with the new Plasma Login Manager we covered back in January. The KDE version also has a new "out-of-the-box first-run experience." In this release, the Fedora Games Lab also adopts KDE Plasma in place of Xfce. Users with existing installs of the KDE edition or the Games Lab will have to install the new login manager or desktop manually if they want it.
Most of the Spins also use the latest versions, so Fedora Budgie also uses Budgie 10.10, which in turn means that it too is Wayland-only. The Spins that align with Ubuntu Flavors are Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt, and Budgie. In addition, Fedora also offers Spins with LXDE, System76's COSMIC, and the Sugar environment for children, plus three tiling window managers: i3, Sway, and Miracle-WM. There's also a KDE Mobile Spin for x86-64 (and some Arm64) tablets and convertible laptops.
There's a nicely short and clear Changes in Fedora 44 For Desktop Users article, which covers the functional changes. One notable change for gamers is support for the new NTSYNC kernel API, which we explained when looking at WINE 11 early this year.
Under the hood
One of the few areas that's slightly behind Ubuntu 26.04 at launch is the kernel: it comes with 6.19.10-300, and on our first update, we got 6.19.14, the last ever version of this now end-of-life kernel. Fedora updates major components within releases more readily than most other stable-release distros, and we're sure kernel 7.0 will follow very soon.
Notably, the list of Changes in Fedora 44 For Developers is much longer than the version for desktop users, but then, one of Fedora's intended roles is as a developer workstation.
Red Hat's release announcement covers the updated plumbing before the desktops. It highlights revised OpenSSL certificate handling, Ansible 13, and MariaDB 11.8, and also mentions that the /boot partition in Fedora Cloud is now formatted with Btrfs.
The list of Changes in Fedora 44 For System Administrators highlights some of the other interesting changes in this version. Fedora 44 now includes a packaged version of the Nix package manager, which we have mentioned before, along with commercialized offshoot Flox.
This doesn't mean Fedora is becoming a variant of the NixOS distribution we tried in 2022. It isn't. Most versions of Fedora are still constructed from RPM packages, as Red Hat has done since the days of Red Hat Linux in the 1990s. (We say "most" because the immutable editions are rather different, which we'll come back to.) But it does mean that Nix enthusiasts can just install Nix, and then manage their own collection of Nix-packaged software inside their home directory.
Next-gen storage, if anyone is still interested
Buried in the notes for sysadmins is a brief mention of Stratis 3.9.0. This is a significant release of Red Hat's next-gen storage management system for Linux, which we looked at a few years ago when Stratis 3.3 came out. In version 3.9.0, it's now possible to take an existing storage pool and either add or remove encryption on the fly.
Stratis is an innovative combination of existing Linux storage tech: it combines the XFS filesystem, device-mapper for logical volume management, plus LUKS and Clevis for encryption.
Among its original goals was to be an all-GPL rival for OpenZFS – arguably, one with less drama around it than the actively developed bcachefs – but Red Hat seems to have de-emphasized it in recent years. That's a great shame: if this COW-snapshot-capable FS were the default in Fedora and the RHELatives, then the architecture of the immutable variants could be drastically simpler and cleaner.
More secure UKI-based bootable containers
A separate announcement from the Fedora Project touted Sealed Fedora Atomic Desktop bootable container images. This seems significant, but it brings together several different elements of next-gen Linux tech that Red Hat and others are working hard on developing… but perhaps rather less diligently on documenting and marketing.
Red Hat's immutable distros are based around a library called OStree. How it works is significantly complex, which is the sort of thing that worries the Reg FOSS desk – but doesn't seem to faze many FOSS industry observers.
At risk of over-simplifying it, OStree handles the binary files of your OS a little like Git handles source code. OStree treats your hard disk as a repository, and constructs something that looks like a normal filesystem layout on the fly. What you see isn't the grisly reality underneath, but this allows OS images to be updated over the internet in one atomic operation – meaning that software updates can be incremental (sending only the differences over the wire), and can be undone if something goes wrong.
Around 2024, OStree was augmented with a new and simpler way of distributing OS images: bootable containers, using a tool called bootc. This is also included in Fedora.
It's a running theme with various elements of Red Hat technology that the company, and its various community projects, tend not to spend much effort on simple, high-level explanations of what things do, how they work, and why you might want them. This leaves that task to external third parties, such as this vulture. In this instance, French developer Quentin Joly made a valiant attempt in February in a lengthy article called Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment. It's quite long and quite complicated, but it's one of the best we have seen yet.
If you read that, then it will help make sense of the new announcement. Along with Fedora 44, there are now sealed container images of the Fedora Atomic Desktops – the immutable graphical desktops, constructed using Lennart Poettering's new Unified Kernel Images, along with the systemd-boot bootloader. We battled with that in 2021, although the experience is a little smoother these days.
All this stuff about Secure Boot, encrypted kernel and initramfs images, full-disk encryption, unmodifiable container images and so on presumably engages great enthusiasm in certain enterprise circles. All we can say is that it's not our cup of tea.
What does Fedora run on? Almost anything
Fedora is a remarkably broad family of offerings and covers an immense range: from cut-down editions for embedding into Internet of Things devices, to covering most of the better known Linux desktop environments, to various types of server OS, conventional and immutable, for bare metal or public cloud. It covers more or less anything you could want to do with any kind of computer, from a router to a mainframe. In fact, the single exception that we noticed is that there's no Fedora for phones.
As usual, it is available in multiple editions, for various platforms, and in a wide array of formats – so many that they're quite hard to enumerate. There are six main Editions, five Atomic Desktops (the project's immutable desktop variant), 12 Fedora Spins with alternative desktop environments, plus seven Fedora Labs with preinstalled bundles of software for different roles.
Among the official Editions, there is Fedora Workstation with GNOME (for both x86-64 and Arm64), the KDE Plasma Desktop edition (for x86-64, Arm64, and 64-bit little-endian PowerPC (ppc64le for short). Then, moving away from graphical desktop OSes, there is Fedora Server, which adds IBM mainframes to that list. Fedora Cloud is designed to run inside VMs, and covers the same four architectures as Server but in 15 different image formats. Fedora IoT is a cut-down OS aimed at single-board computers, supporting both x86-64 and Arm64 in three different formats.
There is also Fedora CoreOS, the project's immutable server, aimed at running container workloads. This too is available across four architectures, in multiple formats: 28 of them for x86, 17 for Arm64, 10 for mainframes, and nine for ppc64le. However, although preliminary builds of version 44 are available, at the time of writing, the default stable version is still version 43.20260413.3.1. That's 64 variants we can leave out for now.
Installation
The Fedora installation process continues to change with this release. Both Fedora and openSUSE are switching to web-based installation programs, which run in a full-screen Firefox instance. This next-generation Anaconda installer is still being refined, and in Fedora 44, the installer configures only network connections that you use during installation, which should make it easier to reconfigure such things later on.
Saying that, it seems to us to make other things harder. Fedora has for many years been trickier to dual-boot than other distros, especially if you use complex partitioning schemes – as this vulture tends to on his testbed machines, some of which have five or six OSes spread across two or more physical drives. Older versions of Fedora at least offered the Blivet-GUI tool for custom partitioning, which was clunky but just about worked if you were careful. In this release, we couldn't see how to customize the disk layout at all, even to the extent of installing onto Ext4 rather than Btrfs. This is more than just the default now: it seems to be enforced.
The sequence of steps in Fedora's installation process is a little different than most Linux distros: it doesn't collect any user information or create any user accounts. Instead, the new installation of the OS does this after it boots up for the first time. In version 44, that post-install process has been streamlined, and now, the Fedora KDE edition (it is no longer a mere Spin – it was promoted a year ago) has a post-installation workflow that's very similar to the GNOME one.
As we noted with Fedora 39, Red Hat favors its own virtualization tools, such as GNOME Boxes, and does little to no testing on rival companies' offerings such as Oracle's VirtualBox. For this release, we went straight to QEMU via the handy UTM hypervisor, and Fedora installed perfectly the first time. The KDE edition was more finicky, and we had to switch to a virtual GPU without graphics acceleration, but it worked.
We don't have any suitable Arm64 hardware on which to try a full installation, but it does have some generic support for UEFI-based Snapdragon-powered laptops, which it calls Windows-on-ARM Laptops. Support for the Raspberry Pi series of devices is lagging behind, especially the Pi 5, but there is some.
Conclusion
It is hard to summarize such a vast and interconnected family of OS releases as Fedora 44. Although many spins are x86-64 only, others support three other CPU architectures, multiple cloud platforms and deployment formats. Even sticking to bare-metal installation and desktop and server editions only, we'd have to install some 30 different variants. We probably couldn't write them all up before Fedora 45 arrives.
Fedora isn't just a testbed for FOSS tech that may one day make it into RHEL, it's also a testbed for Red Hat's quality assurance and testing teams, as well as for its automated build pipelines and associated tooling.
As a desktop Linux distro, it's easier to install than ever, and it's a perfectly capable OS. It excludes anything remotely proprietary, but the installer offers the option to add non-free repositories – so depending on your kit, you may well face more problems getting all your hardware working. By choosing Fedora, you accept more frequent OS upgrades than Debian-based rivals, let alone the daily updates of rolling-release distros such as Arch-based ones. However, saying that, Fedora releases are more thoroughly tested than any rolling-release distro, and it has a large and active community from which to seek help.
Like much in the wider Unix world, in the end, it mostly depends on what you like and are used to, rather than hard objective judgments. If you work in the world of enterprise Linux, especially in the American-influenced parts of the globe, it's almost the default choice. In conscience we can't recommend it for total newcomers to Linux, but it is a good choice for developers wanting the latest tooling. ®