Fedora 44: Leading-Edge Linux?

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:12]Welcome to another video from explaining computers.com.

[00:00:18]This time we're going to look at Fedora Linux 44, which has recently been released.

[00:00:25]I've not looked at Fedora since version 36, and many people have encouraged me to return to it. So, let's go and take a closer look.

[00:00:43]Right here we are on the Fedora website where Fedora 44 is now available. If we scroll down, we see it's available in lots of different versions. six different versions which for desktop users are primarily Fedora Workstation which uses a Gnome desktop and Fedora KDE Plasma desktop which adopts KDE Plasma as its GUI.

[00:01:08]There are also various spins of Fedora with other desktops as we can see over on the spins page but here in this video we're going to stick with the main desktop releases.

[00:01:19]Before we test things out, I think it's important to explain where Fedora sits in the broader Linux ecosystem.

[00:01:27]As we can see, Fedora Workstation describes itself as the leading Linux desktop. And given that it's widely accepted that Ubuntu has a larger user base than Fedora and that there are probably more users of Linux Mint than Fedora Workstation, this claim may raise an eyebrow, but what it means is that Fedora delivers the most leading edge Linux desktop technology and compared to distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Debian, this is most certainly true.

[00:02:01]The reason is that Fedora is the upstream community distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is free for all users and is a community supported project. Meanwhile, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial distro from Red Hat that's supported by subscriptions and in turn Red Hat are the primary sponsors of Fedora. The relationship is explained very clearly over on this page and in particular down in this paragraph as it reads to create Red Hat Enterprise Linux some version of Fedora is forked and enters an extensive development testing and certification process to become a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This makes Fedora a test bed for Red Hat in which new developments can be triled. Fedora indeed focuses on being a showcase for the latest technologies on the Linux frontier, which brings us back to its claim of being the leading Linux desktop.

[00:03:06]Because of this, unlike Ubuntu and related, more conservative distros, Fedora doesn't offer long-term support or LTS versions that can be installed and used for many years. Rather, there's a new release of Fedora every 6 months, each of which receives about 13 months of support. To maintain security and other updates, Fedora users therefore need to upgrade to a new version at least once a year. So, if you want an operating system that you can install and forget about, Fedora is probably not for you. But if you like to be on the cutting edge and try new stuff, then Fedora is a great choice.

[00:03:51]Right, with all of this noted, let's download Fedora 44. And here we're going to start with Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, which is the version I would recommend for general computer users who are new to Linux. Back when I looked at Fedora 36, the KDE version was not even on the homepage and was only listed as a spin.

[00:04:15]So, it's very good to see that the Fedora project has evolved to cater for more general computer users, most obviously including people migrating from Windows. The taglines do I think really say it all with a Fedora workstation saying it's a complete set of tools for developers and makers of all kinds and its default pure Gnome desktop would certainly be a shock to Windows users as we'll see later in the video.

[00:04:45]So for now let's click to download the KDE Plasma version. Here we go. And on this page, we can either download an ISO or we can download Fedora's own media writeup. But here, I think I'll just grab the ISO. Here it is. We will download.

[00:05:06]And there we are. We've obtained the ISO file. And over here on the Linux Mint desktop on which we're working, we're all set up with Bellena Ed to write the file to a USB drive. So, let's just pick up the file.

[00:05:20]There it is. And select a USB drive.

[00:05:23]And finally, click on flash where, as usual, writing an ISO file to a USB drive will delete everything from that USB drive.

[00:05:39]Right here, we are booting from our Fedora USB on my i510400 test rig on which we're going to install it.

[00:05:49]And this system has got a GT1030 graphics card, which means we can test how Fedora deals with an older Nvidia GPU.

[00:05:58]And here we are arriving on a KD Plasma desktop. Always good to arrive on a KD Plasma desktop where I'm going to click to install to hard drive or in my case SSD.

[00:06:11]However, when we do this, something bad will happen. Let's just fast forward a bit in time.

[00:06:17]And there we are. We have a crash report. The installer has failed. And I've done this several times and I'm pretty certain it's because of my Nvidia graphics card. And I have tried running this with secure boot turned off.

[00:06:29]Doesn't make any difference. And so what we're going to do is to close this down.

[00:06:33]And we're going to restart.

[00:06:38]And now at the menu, which for some reason has a larger font, which is actually quite nice, we will select troubleshooting and start Fedora KD Desktop Live in basic graphics mode.

[00:06:50]And here we are back again clearly in a different graphics mode. So once again, let's click to install the hard drive where this time things are working.

[00:07:00]Okay, so we now need to check our language. That is all right. I need to change my keyboard layout though like that. And the way we do this is a little strange. We have to go down here and find it. There it is. And then we now have to remove the language we don't want. Like that. This is really quite a bizarre way to select a language in an installer. But it's worked. So we can now click on next where we now need to select the destination for our install.

[00:07:27]And this is going to be on the SSD on this system. We will use the entire disc like that. and click on next where we have the option to encrypt the drive if we wish. A good idea on a mobile device but here this is a test install on the desktop. So we'll just click on next.

[00:07:44]And there we are. We can review our install. Everything looks okay. And so I'll click this. I understand all existing data will be erased. And we'll click on erase data and install.

[00:07:56]So, it's now appropriate to conjure up the magic of film making to accelerate time. And there we are. Fedora Linux 44 has been successfully installed. So, we'll now exit to live desktop because there's no option here to directly reboot the system. We have to know we need to do that. And so, we will now reboot.

[00:08:18]And if things are okay, we'll now boot into our installation of Fedora 44. And here we are. So it now says we need to begin setup. A good idea. We'll click on that. I'll keep my language as British English.

[00:08:35]I need to confirm my keyboard layout.

[00:08:37]We've already done this. This is duplication. Dear me. And I think we'll be wild and have a dark theme.

[00:08:45]After which we need to create a local account on this system.

[00:08:51]following which we'll accept the default host name of Fedora.

[00:08:56]Check our time zone which for me here is okay. And there we are. Our device is now ready.

[00:09:04]So let's log in.

[00:09:09]And oh look, we're welcome to Fedora.

[00:09:12]But I think for now we'll close down the welcome center because I want to make a few scaling changes. and I'll come back to you after that.

[00:09:27]Greetings. Here I am back again with visual settings to my liking. Fedora 44 also prompted me to install a very large update, a whopping 3.5 GB in size, but the process completed with no issues. I should also have noted earlier that the recommended minimum hardware requirement for Fedora 44 is a 2 GHz dualcore processor. 2 GB of RAM and 15 GB of drive space. Although 4 GB of RAM and 20 GB of drive space are strongly recommended.

[00:10:03]It's not a surprise that the dominant feature of Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44 is its KDE Plasma desktop. Specifically, we get KDE Plasma 6.6.4, which is the latest release and includes the new plasma setup and plasma login manager that we just saw during first boot. By default, KDE Plasma provides us with a bottom panel akin to the taskbar in Windows. And on this, we have a left applications menu. We also have an icon to access settings where every aspect of a desktop is beautifully presented and highly configurable. So for example, if we go down to colors and themes, we can see the different global themes that are included. But everything here can be changed, colors, application styles, what they call plasma style, icon cursors, etc. It is really very nice indeed. And in fact, if you like to have a traditional menu-based desktop, it's very hard to beat KD Plasma.

[00:11:07]If we take a look in system and in info center, we can see we're running Linux kernel 6.19.14 with various characters on the end.

[00:11:19]Fedora 44 actually ships with Linux kernel 61910.

[00:11:25]So the large update I've just mentioned clearly moved us on to a slightly more recent version of core Linux code.

[00:11:32]However, a few weeks ago, Ubuntu 2604 released with Linux kernel 7.0.

[00:11:39]So at launch, Fedora 44 is not leading the pack with the very latest Linux kernel release, although I'm sure it will catch up soon.

[00:11:51]Like Ubuntu 2604, Fedora 44 officially enables the NTSync kernel module to improve gaming performance under Wine as well as Steam Play gaming using Proton.

[00:12:05]Whilst we're here in Info Center, let's click on system monitor. There we go. To see what's going on. Quite a lot of memory being used as we're doing nothing other than running system monitor. And if you're wondering about what's going on up here, we're not reading at the moment data from our GPU. I'll say more about GPU support in the next part of the video.

[00:12:26]Turning to applications, let's look at what's pre-installed. Under development, we have KD debug settings. Under education, there is Libra Office Maths.

[00:12:35]Under games, we have an installed version of Solitaire, which I'll resist the temptation to play. Under graphics, we have Libra Office Drawer, a viewer, and a little painting program. Under internet, we have the Firefox web browser, and various KDE plasma tools.

[00:12:53]As we can see, under multimedia, basically a video player. And then under office, as you'll know already, we've got the rest of Libra Office. There it is. And then finally under system we have the usual kind of stuff including a graphical firewall interface which wants my password.

[00:13:13]There we go. And I think it's very good to see a firewall graphical interface here in the system. You may remember if you saw my recent review. We don't get such a thing installed in Ubuntu 264.

[00:13:26]Returning to the menu. I think we missed out utilities. Are there exciting things in utilities, Chris? Not at all. But I want to make sure I show you everything.

[00:13:35]In fact, there is something exciting here. There is the spectacle screen capture utility which is part of the KDE plasma desktop. And in this latest version of KD Plasma, this can do OCR, optical character recognition. And to demonstrate that, let's just run up a web browser like that. Here is explaining computers. And we will open the image at the top of the page in a new tab. So what we've got here is purely an image. And we'll now bring up the spectacle screenshot tool by pressing print screen rather than selecting it from the menu. There we are. And I will click and drag just generally to capture that part of the screen. And then we'll click on extract text. There we are. It has extracted a text. We can open it in a text editor.

[00:14:21]And there we are. It's extracted the text from the screen grab.

[00:14:32]The Fedora project has a very strict policy on only using FOS or free and open-source software. As a consequence, during the installation of Fedora 44, we were not offered the opportunity to install third-party or proprietary drivers and multimedia codecs. And this has at least two significant implications.

[00:14:56]Firstly, it means that Fedora 44 cannot play some audio and video files unless the user executes the terminal commands required to install common third-party codec support.

[00:15:11]Secondly, it means that the best drivers for an Nvidia graphics card are not automatically installed. rather on a system with an Nvidia GPU, we only get the open-source Neuvo driver, which is far from ideal.

[00:15:28]And to be clear, on systems with AMD or Intel graphics, everything is fine and the correct GPU drivers are installed.

[00:15:38]But on a system like this one with Nvidia graphics, this is not the case.

[00:15:44]Here on our GT1030 test system due to only having the Neuvo Nvidia driver, HDMI audio does not work, which is kind of fundamental. And we also get worse GPU performance than if we were using the proper Nvidia driver.

[00:16:04]What makes matters worse is that Fedora 44 does not have a graphical driver manager. So the only way to install the required proprietary Nvidia driver is to use the terminal.

[00:16:19]It's worth noting that I've installed Fedora 44 on exactly the same computer on which I installed Ubuntu 2604 a few weeks ago. And when we installed Ubuntu, there was a simple tickbox option to install third-party drivers. This then resulted in the correct proprietary Nvidia driver and related control software being automatically installed even for my older GT1030.

[00:16:48]I'd also point out that Zoron OS 18 installs the correct proprietary driver if you select the Nvidia option from the initial boot menu. and some other DROs do a similar thing with many others such as Linux Mint providing a very straightforward driver manager in which appropriate NVIDIA drivers can be installed by anybody able to operate a mouse here in Fedora 44. I'm sure we could mess around in the terminal and get my Nvidia hardware working properly, but in my view in 2026 in a desktop operating system, this really should not been necessary. After all, the fundamental role of any operating system is to provide the interface between a computer's hardware, applications, and user. And in 2026, this should include the automatic installation of the best GPU and audio drivers or at the very least the facilitation of the same via an interface with which all computer users will feel comfortable.

[00:17:57]Sadly, Fedora 44's emission of this very basic functionality is the sort of thing that gets desktop Linux a bad name. And it's hardly consistent with any claim to be the leading Linux desktop.

[00:18:18]As we noted earlier, Fedora 44 is available in a number of versions or spins that offer an alternative desktop environment. And there's quite a few of these as we can see on the spins page.

[00:18:32]However, Fedora also offers specialized spins under the banner of Fedora Labs.

[00:18:38]These include curated bundles of software and are available for astronomy design, gaming, music production, Python coding, scientific work, and security audit and testing. You can add the software contained in a particular lab using the terminal or you can do a clean install by downloading the appropriate ISO or using the Fedora media writer.

[00:19:08]With the release of Fedora 44, the Fedora Games Lab now has a KDE Plasma desktop rather than XFCE.

[00:19:18]As we can see, quite a few applications are included which have been selected to showcase some of the best games available in Fedora.

[00:19:28]Over in yet another branch of the Fedora family, we discover a number of atomic editions. These have a read only root file system and apply updates as an isolated system image. The atomic fedora distros are therefore very stable and secure as the root file system is exactly the same on every installation and never changes as it's used. This is extremely interesting and I may therefore return to the atomic fedora distros in a future video.

[00:20:07]Having noted that a lot of different versions of Fedora 44 are available, I thought we should take a look at the flagship Fedora workstation. And so, here we are. Under the hood, this is pretty much the same as the KDE Plasma edition, but with a Gnome desktop, and specifically a Gnome 50 desktop, which is the latest version. By default, this has got a top panel with on the right a menu for things like shutting down the system, but also accessing the settings menu where, as you can see, we can change the style, backgrounds, that type of thing. And importantly here in Gnome 50, we go to displays, we've now got proper fractional scaling with improved text rendering, so text doesn't appear blurred when you're using a fractional scale.

[00:20:56]kind of related. If we go down to accessibility and we look under seeing and text size, whereas we used to have here just a toggle for normal or larger text, we now have a slider so it can more accurately change the size of the text. And I personally think these two improvements are very welcome indeed.

[00:21:16]It's important to note that here in Fedora 44, we get a pure or vanilla installation of the Gnome 50 desktop environment, not tweaked like in Ubuntu.

[00:21:28]So whilst Ubuntu's Gnome desktop by default has a lefth hand dock where common and favorite apps are pinned, Fedora workstation does not. And to access applications, we therefore have to click top left, which brings up a bottom dash where applications can be pinned. So for example, we could launch the file manager. And if we want to get to all applications, we again have to click top left and then go down to the icon here to show all apps. And here are all the apps, Libra Office, etc. As we saw in the KD Plasma edition, it's worth pointing out you can bring up the dash using the keyboard rather than clicking up here top left. You can also just press the super key on the keyboard, the Windows key, like that, which is probably the easier way to do it.

[00:22:15]Although I still think it's strange that they actually put in a graphical means, which is clicking top left to access applications bottom center. But this is just a Gnome thing.

[00:22:26]Something else that's a Gnome thing in the vanilla install like we get in Fedora 44 is that Windows do not have maximize and minimize controls. And so we can maximize a window by clicking on it like that and bring it back to normal size like that. But we can't minimize it. And again, if we look back to the Gnome desktop in Ubuntu, it does have window maximize and minimize controls because it's been tweaked to include them. Now, it's worth pointing out you can add them back in here in Fedora by installing an application such as Gnome Tweaks, but in my view, this really shouldn't be necessary. Basic window controls are really a basic thing. And this is just one example why for most users I would recommend Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop rather than Fedora Workstation.

[00:23:23]Fedora 44 is an excellent family of distros for developers and others who want access to the latest Linux technologies.

[00:23:33]However, due to the emission of a straightforward means of installing proprietary drivers and codecs, it's not a DRO I would recommend to most people migrating from Windows, especially if you have an Nvidia GPU.

[00:23:48]But now, that's it for another video. If you've enjoyed what you've seen here, please press that like button. If you haven't subscribed, please subscribe.

[00:23:58]And I hope to talk to you again very soon.