The big changes

Fedora 44 is shipping with Gnome 50 and KDE Plasma 6.6 as the two main editions. Here are some highlights of the changes coming to each.

Gnome 50

• Better parental controls with...
  • Screen time limits
  • Bed time settings
  • Web content filtering added under the hood
• Accessibility improvements
  • Screen reader improvements such as automatic language switching, and mouse review under Wayland
  • A new Reduce Motion toggle in the Accessibility menu
• Gnome's new document/PDF viewer, Papers, now supports text and draw annotations
• Nautilus, file manager, got performance improvement with better memory management and thumbnail loading
• Calendar got support for ICS exports, a redesigned quick add dialogue, and smoother scrolling in the month view
• Settings improvements for the sound panel and the colour management
• Remote Desktop got some major improvements with hardware accelerated streaming landing in Gnome 50, as well as HiDPI support, and headless sessions
• Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) and Fractional Scaling are generally available in Gnome 50 with some additional bug fixes behind them
• More details can be found here

KDE Plasma 6.6

• New and improved on-screen keyboard
• Text extraction supported in the screenshot tool, Spectacle
• A new Plasma setup experience for post-install configuration
• A new way to save your current theme as a global configuration
• More colour customization for windows
• Setting an emoji skin is now part of the emoji selector
• Quickly connecting to wifi using the system camera to scan a QR code
• Quickly adjusting the volume of a sound playing from any window by hovering over the task bar icon and scrolling down
• Accessibility improvements
  • New grayscale colour blindness filter
  • A new tracking switcher on the magnifier feature
• Ability to hide windows in screen recordings
• A new login manager built for Plasma
• More details here

The background changes

There are also some other changes happening in the background for Fedora users that may impact them.

Installer improvements

• Default network profiles will not be created for all wired devices
• Plasma Setup to be used on the KDE edition of Fedora for post-installation configuration
• Switching from SDDM to Plasma Login Manager
• Fedora Cloud to switch /boot to a BTRFS subvolume

Package upgrades

• LLVM 22
• Ruby 4
• Golang 1.26
• CMake 4
• Django 6
• Helm 4
• Ansible 13
• PHP 8.5
• GCC 16.1
• binutils 2.46
• glibc 2.43
• gdb 16.3

MISC

• Packagekit will be switched to DNF5
• Java 21 removed from the repos
• Nix packaging tool
• NTSYNC Kernel module enabled for WINE packages

The full list of changes can be found here.

Happy hacking 🙂