The full release of Fedora Linux 44 is drawing near, and, as such, the Fedora Project has officially made Fedora 44 Beta available for download for those who want to test the upcoming version of the workstation Linux distribution. Fedora 44 has a long changelog, but some of the biggest changes are simply newer versions of the included defaults, like the move to Gnome 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6 as well as an update to Linux 6.19. Like many distributions that use KDE, the Fedora 44 KDE Desktop edition officially makes the move from SDDM to Plasma Login Manager as the default. In general, Fedora 44 also improves things like the installer, which no longer automatically and unnecessarily creates network profiles for devices not involved in the initial configuration. This makes it easier to configure these devices later when necessary.

Fedora 44 also adds support for Budgie 10.10, which is itself migrating from X11 to Wayland, Fedora changes the build infrastructure to make package builds more predictable and reproducible. Wayland support and the built-in emojis are also now better supported thanks to the upgrade to IBus 1.5.34, and various other frameworks and programming languages have been updated to improve security and modernize the OS. Fedora 44 launches officially on April 14, 2026, but beta ISOs for Fedora Workstation (with Gnome) and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop can be downloaded ahead of the official launch. There are also the usual ISOs for server, cloud, and IoT versions.