Fedora 44 Brings GNOME 50, KDE 6.6, and Better Gaming (With Screenshots)

We take Fedora’s newest weekly‑distro pick for a spin to see how it handles real‑world browsing, office work, media… with a bit of gaming on the side.

The FOSS Force Distro of the Week — Fedora 44

Fedora 44 was released on Tuesday, which means it’s time for getting up close and personal with this Red Hat sponsored community distro.

Fedora 44 has introduced several significant updates and enhancements across its desktop environments and core functionalities. First, on the Workstation edition of the distro, Gnome 50 is the desktop environment, which offers refinements in accessibility, color management, and remote desktop capabilities. The KDE edition also gets an upgrade to KDE Plasma 6.6, providing a unified experience with a new Plasma Login Manager and other desktop enhancements.

While Gnome and KDE are just two of the desktop environments that grace Fedora 44, the Fedora Project provides users a number of desktop and window manager “spins,” including –take a deep breath — Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate-Compiz, i3, LXQt, LXDE, SOAS (also known as Sugar on a Stick, the desktop for the One Laptop Per Child computers), Sway, Budgie, Miracle, and Cosmic.

But we’re getting ahead of the story.

Installing Fedora 44

The minimum system requirements for Fedora 44 Workstation edition are a 2 GHz dual core processor, 2 GB or more RAM, and at least 20 GB of available disk space. Its ISO is 2.7 GB, making it easy to transfer onto a USB drive.

Booting to the drive brought up a window that offered the choice to install to the hard drive, or to run it as a live session. I chose installation, and the Anaconda installer took me through the usual steps of keyboard and disk setup, including encryption if wanted. After that it was off to the races. Installation took under 10 minutes, and once it was ready I rebooted into the newly installed system.

Upon reboot, the Anaconda installer finished the last part of the installation, specifically the time zone and login part. With that, I was free to be on my merry way with Fedora 44.

Kicking the Tires

With this release, Wayland is the sole display server protocol under Gnome, so adios X11 at least for the Workstation and KDE Plasma editions. Other spins may continue to make X11 available to accommodate those running older software that require it.

On first boot, Fedora 44 offered a brief tour that provides an overview of what’s new, a delve into some of the distro’s search features, and a brief window on workspaces. After the all-important first update (there were 11 updates on the Workstation edition even on the day of the release, for some reason) I was ready to put Fedora 44 through its paces.

The new release packs quite a bit of software into its rather small ISO, including Firefox and LibreOffice, along with a wide range of Gnome standard apps and a variety of Gnome-based tools. No email program was included by default, so off to Gnome’s Software app to pick up a few items to make my Fedora experience work. That included Thunderbird for email, the VLC media player for music, GIMP for photo editing, and that was it.

As expected, Fedora 44 hardly broke a sweat in dealing with any and all requests. VLC ran flawlessly, so the tunes were non-stop. Firefox and Thunderbird operated easily in tandem for web surfing and emailing purposes. For work — yeah, work — LibreOffice Writer worked well with GIMP in tow. Indeed, the System Monitor rarely went over 4 GB in memory despite all of these programs being opened and used simultaneously.

Fedora 44 ships with Linux kernel 6.19, which brings enhanced power efficiency for Intel’s latest processors and native driver support for the newest generations of Wi-Fi 7 chipsets. For developers — and Fedora is often considered to be primarily a developer’s distro — the system compiler stack has been upgraded to GCC 16 and LLVM 22, meaning if you compile C, C++, or Rust, you gain immediate access to the latest language feature optimizations.

Also, there have been enhancements aimed at gamers. This includes a reworked Games Lab that leverages the latest technologies for better gaming. Installing Wine, Steam, or open source game launchers like Lutris or Heroic Games Launcher, now quietly pulls in the NTSYNC kernel module as a recommended dependency. NTSYNC handles thread synchronization at the kernel level, which takes a chunk of work off Wine and Proton’s plate, resulting in better Windows game and software compatibility, along with a performance bump for many titles.

Final Thoughts

There was a time when a major distribution upgrade was a harrowing event that took up most, if not all, of a weekend. Not any more. Among other things, the stability of Fedora’s dnf system-upgrade process can claim much of the credit for that.

That noted, Fedora 44 is an aggressive release that has done away with X11 in its major editions which, no matter how you feel about X.org, pushes the Linux desktop forward. It has also combined a wide assortment of groundbreaking additions, from installation changes with Anaconda, to the wide variety of tools added to the distro, to the variety of gaming issues that the distro has seemingly handled with its usual aplomb.

All of this makes Fedora stand out as a leader in the Linux universe. While opting to try out a version other than Workstation would have been my choice — I am not a big fan of Gnome as a desktop environment — any new user coming from Windows would have an easy time converting to Linux via Fedora, no matter which spin they choose. And, once again, Fedora’s reputation among intermediate and greybeards is second to none.

To download Fedora 44, visit the project’s download page. And for a variety of spins, visit the Fedora Spins download page.

Do you have a distro you think would make a great feature for FOSS Force’s Distro of the Week? Don’t be shy—let us know! Offer your suggestions in the comments below (or use the “contact us” link under our masthead) and we’ll make an effort to make it so… No suggestion is too mainstream or too niche—let us know what you’d like to see!

Suddenly we’re in the mood to hear a little 10,000 Maniacs…