Linux Distribution Fedora 44: KDE Plasma and Wayland in Focus

With a slight delay, the Linux distribution Fedora in version 44 has finally been released in April. The delays were caused by bugs in the new setup wizard for KDE Plasma, among other things. The new release otherwise promises mainly gradual improvements.

Fedora Workstation updates the Gnome desktop to version 50. This brings new features for “digital wellbeing” and a lot of fine-tuning, for example in remote login, the Orca screen reader, or the document viewer. Furthermore, with Gnome 50, the X server code has been completely removed from the codebase.

New features in KDE Plasma variants

A large part of the changes in Fedora 44 concerns the three KDE Plasma variants (Desktop Edition, Mobile Spin, and Kinoite). Their users can look forward to Plasma version 6.6 and a new “Account Setup”: instead of querying user data such as username and time zone during installation, this now happens later during the first boot. This aligns the setup process with the Gnome variants; furthermore, it allows computer manufacturers to ship devices pre-installed with KDE, where users only need to enter their personal data upon first startup.

Instead of SDDM (Simple Desktop Display Manager), its modern successor PLM (Plasma Login Manager) is now responsible for login. However, existing installations must perform this change manually – it does not happen automatically during the update. Additionally, the Fedora variant Games Lab is being switched from Xfce to KDE to benefit from Wayland.

Budgie Desktop in Wayland

Fedora 44 ships the Budgie desktop in version 10.10. This has apparently been hastily ported to Wayland; as a side effect, screen and Bluetooth settings are now managed in separate apps and no longer in the Budgie Control Center. In the screenshot application, entire windows can no longer be selected, and instead of LightDM, SDDM will be delivered as the login manager in the future, which has just been declared obsolete by KDE.

The Linux kernel is being upgraded to version 6.19, and many important development tools such as PHP, Ruby, Django, and Ansible are receiving major updates. A special treat: the declarative package manager Nix can now be installed natively from Fedora sources and provides access to the entire NixOS software ecosystem.

For the main versions Workstation (Gnome) and KDE Plasma Desktop, as well as Fedora IoT, there are installation images for x86-64 and aarch64 (ARM); the main versions for Servers (Server, CoreOS, and Cloud) also for IBM's s390x and PowerPC (ppc64le). More about the new features in Fedora 44 can be found in the Release Notes as well as in detail in the list of all implemented changes.

(ktn)