The Fedora Project has officially approved Fedora Linux 44 for release, setting April 28, 2026, as the final ship date. The development team selected the RC 1.7 compose as the golden build after a careful review of outstanding blockers. For those who cannot wait until Tuesday, the ISO images are already available for early download.
The road to RC 1.7 was not without detours. Earlier candidates, RC 1.5 and RC 1.6, were both rejected during the go/no-go process. They lacked critical package updates that the team considered mandatory before clearing the release gate. RC 1.7 addressed those concerns and passed the final review.
Two security fixes pushed RC 1.7 across the finish line. The first is Firefox 150, which resolves a significant number of security vulnerabilities that would have blocked the release outright.
The second is a PackageKit patch that closes a local privilege escalation race condition. That particular flaw allowed a local process to potentially execute code as root, making it a non-negotiable fix before shipping to the public.
Not every issue made the cut. Two installer problems have been formally waived to Fedora 45. The first involves the Anaconda installer’s Cockpit-based web UI failing to enforce minimum partition sizes for /boot and /boot/efi.
Users relying on the web UI path for manual partitioning with specific size constraints may encounter unexpected behavior. Standard installs should not be affected.
The second waiver covers non-ASCII keyboard layout selection. In certain configurations, the installer fails to automatically add US English as a fallback layout when a non-ASCII keyboard is selected. The upstream developers could not deliver a fix before the freeze deadline, so it moves forward to Fedora 45 Final. Its practical impact is limited for most users, but anyone with a complex multilingual keyboard setup should be aware of it before upgrading.
Test coverage for this release came in close to 100 percent, which is a strong result given the resource constraints the team is working under. There are gaps in advanced storage scenario testing and Windows 11 dual-boot coverage, but the team judged those acceptable.
The Windows 11 dual-boot test gap is worth noting for users running that combination, a manual post-upgrade boot verification is a sensible precaution.
Fedora CoreOS and the IoT edition are both cleared to ship alongside the main desktop release without any reported issues.
Fedora Linux 44 is a significant release on its own merits. It ships with the Linux 6.19 kernel, which brings the usual round of performance improvements and expanded hardware support.
GNOME 50 arrives as the default desktop for Fedora Workstation, completing the full transition away from X11; there is no legacy session fallback. KDE Plasma 6.6 powers the KDE spin, with the new Plasma Login Manager replacing SDDM across all KDE variants. The Budgie spin moves to Budgie 10.10, which also completes its own shift to Wayland.
Under the hood, the toolchain has seen substantial updates. GCC moves to version 16.1, LLVM to version 22, Go to 1.26, Ruby to 4.0, PHP to 8.5, and RPM to 6.0, among others.
The NTSYNC kernel module is also enabled by default for Wine and gaming packages in this release, which can provide meaningful performance improvements for users running Windows applications or games through compatibility layers.
The official ISO images are live now and can be downloaded directly from the RC 1.7 announcement page. There is no reason to wait until Tuesday if you are ready to install today; just verify the checksums before writing anything to a drive. The official release date remains April 28, 2026, for those who prefer to wait for the staged rollout.
More information about Fedora Linux 44 is available on the official Fedora Project website.
