KDE Plasma – Sick Gaming

On Tuesday, 10 March 2026, it is our pleasure to announce the availability of Fedora Linux 44 Beta! As with every beta release, this is your opportunity to contribute by testing out the upcoming Fedora Linux 44 Beta release. Testing the beta release is a vital way you can contribute to the Fedora Project. Your testing is invaluable feedback that helps us refine what the final F44 experience will be for all users.

We hope you enjoy this latest beta version of Fedora!

How to get the Fedora Linux 44 Beta release

You can download Fedora Linux 44 Beta, or our pre-release edition versions, from any of the following places:

The Fedora CoreOS “next” stream moves to the beta release one week later. Content for F44, however, is still available from their current branched stream to enjoy now.

You can also update an existing system to the beta using DNF system-upgrade.

The Fedora Linux 44 Beta release content may also be available for Fedora Spins and Labs.

Fedora Linux 44 Beta highlights

Like every Beta release, the Fedora Linux 44 Beta release is packed with changes. The following are highlights from the full set of changes for F44. They are ready for you to test drive in the Fedora Linux 44 Beta.

Installer and desktop Improvements

Goodbye Anaconda Created Default Network Profiles: This change impacts how Anaconda populates network device profiles. Only those devices configured during installation (by boot options, kickstart or interactively in UI) become part of the final system install. This behavior change addresses some long standing issues caused by populating network profiles for all network devices. These made it difficult to correctly reconfigure devices post-install.

Unified KDE Out of the Box Experience: This change introduces the post-install Plasma Setup application for all Fedora KDE variants. In the variants making use of this new setup application, the Anaconda configuration will be adjusted to disable redundant configuration stages that duplicate the functionality exposed in the setup application.

KDE Plasma Login Manager: This change introduced the Plasma Login Manager (PLM) for Fedora KDE variants instead of SDDM for the default login manager.

Reworked Games Lab: This change modernizes the Games Lab deliverable by leveraging the latest technologies. This offers a high quality gaming and game development experience. It includes a change from Xfce to KDE Plasma to take advantage of the latest and greatest Wayland stack for gaming.

Budgie 10.10: Budgie 10.10 is the latest release of Budgie Desktop. Budgie 10.10 migrates from X11 to Wayland. This ensures a viable long-term user experience for Fedora Budgie users and lays groundwork for the next major Budgie release.

LiveCD Improvements

Automatic DTB selection for aarch64 EFI systems: This change intends to make the aarch64 Fedora Live ISO images work out of the box on Windows on ARM (WoA) laptops. This will automatically select the right DTB at boot.

Modernize Live Media: This change modernizes the live media experience by switching to the “new” live environment setup scripts provided by livesys-scripts and leverage new functionality in dracut to enable support for automatically enabling persistent overlays when flashed to USB sticks.

System Enhancements

GNU Toolchain Update: The updates to the GNU Toolchain ensure Fedora stays current with the latest features, improvements, and bug and security fixes from the upstream gcc, glibc, binutils, and gdb projects. They guarantee a working system compiler, assembler, static and dynamic linker, core language runtimes, and debugger.

Reproducible Package Builds: Over the last few releases, we changed our build infrastructure to make package builds reproducible. This is enough to reach 90%. The remaining issues need to be fixed in individual packages. With this change, all package builds are expected to be reproducible in the F44 final release. Bugs will be filed against packages when an irreproducibility is detected. The goal is to have no fewer than 99% of package builds reproducible.

Packit as a dist-git CI: This change continues down the path of modernizing the Fedora CI experience by moving forward with the final phase of the plan to integrate Packit as the default CI for Fedora dist-git.

Remove Python Mock Usage: python-mock was deprecated with Fedora 34. However, it is still in use in many packages. We plan to go through the remaining usages and clean them up, with the goal of retiring python-mock from Fedora.

Adoption of new R Packaging Guidelines: This change introduces new rpm macros to help standardize and automate common R language packaging tasks resulting in a simplification of the rpm spec files.

Introduction of Nix Developer Tool: This change adds the nix package manager developer tool to Fedora.

Hardlink identical files in packages by default: With this change, all fedora packages will automatically hardlink files under /usr by default as a post install action. The mechanism introduced in this change is designed specifically to address reproducibility validation race conditions found in use by traditional hardlinking approaches.

Fedora Linux 44 Beta upgrades and removals

Golang 1.26: Fedora users will receive the most current and recent Go release. Being close to upstream allows us to avoid security issues and provide more updated features. Consequently, Fedora will provide a reliable development platform for the Go language and projects written in it.

MariaDB 11.8 as Distribution Default Version: The distribution default for MariaDB packaging will switch to 11.8. Multiple versions of the MariaDB packages will continue to be available. This change only impact which of the versioned packages presents itself as the unversioned “default”

IBus 1.5.34: Fedora users will benefit from better support of Wayland and Emoji features.

Django 6.x: Fedora Users can make use of the latest Django version; users who use Django add-ons that are not ready for 6.0 yet should be able to switch it out for python3-django5

TagLib 2: This change puts Fedora on the latest supported version, and it will benefit from improvements in future minor releases with a simple update.

Helm 4: Helm 4 has been released upstream with intentional backwards-incompatible changes relative to Helm 3. To ensure a smooth transition for Fedora, this Change introduces Helm 4 as the default helm package, while providing a parallel-installable helm3 package for users and tooling that still rely on Helm 3.

Ansible 13: Update from Ansible 11 and Ansible Core 2.18 to Ansible 13 and Ansible Core 2.20. This includes major robustness and security fixes to the templating engine which might break existing playbooks that had incorrect behavior. This was silently ignored in previous releases.

TeXLive 2025: With this change, we update to the latest version of TeXLive (2025). We also move to a modularized packaging system, which splits the “texlive” SPEC into a set of collection and scheme packages. This reflects the categorization that TeXLive upstream defines. Each collection package will package the immediate component dependencies as subpackages.

Drop QEMU 32-bit Host Builds: Fedora will stop building QEMU on i686 architecture. This change brings Fedora inline with the QEMU upstream project decision to deprecate support for 32-bit host builds. Upstream intends to start removing 32-bit host build support code in a future release and will assume 64-bit atomic ops in all builds.

Drop FUSE 2 libraries in Atomic Desktops: Remove FUSE 2 binaries and libraries from all Atomic Desktops

Drop compatibility for pkla polkit rules in Atomic Desktops: Remove support for deprecated pkla polkit rules from all Fedora Atomic Desktops

More information about Fedora Linux 44 Beta

Details and more information on the many great changes landing in Fedora Linux 44 are available on the Change Set page.

One of the nice things about using Linux is the wide choice of desktop environments. Fedora Linux official Worksation edition comes with GNOME as default desktop environment, but you can choose another desktop environment as default via Fedora Spins. This article will go into a little more detail about the Fedora Linux Spins. You can find an overview of all the Fedora Linux variants in my previous article Introduce the different Fedora Linux editions.

KDE Plasma Desktop

This Fedora Linux comes with KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment. KDE Plasma is an elegant desktop environment that is very easy to customize. Therefore, you can freely and easily change the appearance of your desktop as you wish. You can customize your favorite themes, install the widgets you want, change icons, change fonts, customize panels according to your preferences, and install various extensions from the community.

Fedora Linux KDE Plasma Desktop is installed with a variety of ready-to-use applications. You’re ready to go online with Firefox, Kontact, Telepathy, KTorrent, and KGet. LibreOffice, Okular, Dolphic, and Ark are ready to use for your office needs. Your multimedia needs will be met with several applications such as Elisa, Dragon Player, K3B, and GwenView.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/kde/

XFCE Desktop

This version is perfect for those who want a balance between ease of customizing appearance and performance. XFCE itself is made to be fast and light, but still has an attractive appearance. This desktop environment is becoming popular for those with older devices.

Fedora Linux XFCE is installed with various applications that suit your daily needs. These applications are Firefox, Pidgin, Gnumeric, AbiWord, Ristretto, Parole, etc. Fedora Linux XFCE also already has a System Settings menu to make it easier for you to configure your Fedora Linux.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/xfce/

LXQT Desktop

This spin comes with a lightweight Qt desktop environment, and focuses on modern classic desktops without slowing down the system. This version of Fedora Linux includes applications based on the Qt5 toolkit and is Breeze themed. You will be ready to carry out various daily activities with built-in applications, such as QupZilla, QTerminal, FeatherPad, qpdfview, Dragon Player, etc.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/lxqt/

MATE-Compiz Desktop

Fedora Linux MATE Compiz Desktop is a combination of MATE and Compiz Fusion. MATE desktop allows this version of Fedora Linux to work optimally by prioritizing productivity and performance. At the same time Compiz Fusion provides a beautiful 3D look with Emerald and GTK + themes. This Fedora Linux is also equipped with various popular applications, such as Firefox, LibreOffice, Parole, FileZilla, etc.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/mate-compiz/

Cinnamon Desktop

Because of its user-friendly interface, Fedora Linux Cinnamon Desktop is perfect for those who may be new to the Linux operating system. You can easily understand how to use this version of Fedora Linux. This spin has built-in applications that are ready to use for your daily needs, such as Firefox, Pidgin, GNOME Terminal, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Shotwell, etc. You can use Cinnamon Settings to configure your operating system.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/cinnamon/

LXDE Desktop

Fedora Linux LXDE Desktop has a desktop environment that performs fast but is designed to keep resource usage low. This spin is designed for low-spec hardware, such as netbooks, mobile devices, and older computers. Fedora Linux LXDE has lightweight and popular applications, such as Midori, AbiWord, Osmo, Sylpheed, etc.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/lxde/

SoaS Desktop

SoaS stands for Sugar on a Stick. Fedora Linux Sugar Desktop is a learning platform for children, so it has a very simple interface that is easy for children to understand. The word “stick” in this context refers to a thumb drive or memory “stick”. This means this OS has a compact size and can be completely installed on a thumb drive. Schoolchildren can carry their OS on a thumb drive, so they can use it easily at home, school, library, and elsewhere. Fedora Linux SoaS has a variety of interesting learning applications for children, such as Browse, Get Books, Read, Turtle Blocks, Pippy, Paint, Write, Labyrinth, Physic, and FotoToon.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/soas/

i3 Tiling WM

The i3 Tiling WM spin of Fedora Linux is a bit different from the others. This Fedora Linux spin does not use a desktop environment, but only uses a window manager. The window manager used is i3, which is a very popular tiling window manager among Linux users. Fedora i3 Spin is intended for those who focus on interacting using a keyboard rather than pointing devices, such as a mouse or touchpad. This spin of Fedora Linux is equipped with various applications, such as Firefox, NM Applet, brightlight, azote, htop, mousepad, and Thunar.

More information is available at this link: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/en/i3/

Conclusion

Fedora Linux provides a large selection of desktop environments through Fedora Linux Spins. You can simply choose one of the Fedora Spins, and immediately enjoy Fedora Linux with the desktop environment of your choice along with its ready-to-use built-in applications. You can find complete information about Fedora Spins at https://spins.fedoraproject.org/.

Tag: KDE Plasma

Announcing Fedora Linux 44 Beta