Fedora 44: An Open Linux Release Ubuntu Cannot Copy
Zero telemetry, packages you can host yourself, and a community that overruled Red Hat in 2023. IBM still pays the engineers.
Canonical locked the toolchain. Five days later, Fedora shipped the release you can host yourself, funded by IBM, governed by a community vote.
The same week Canonical shipped a developer toolchain that flows through servers only Canonical operates, Fedora shipped a 6.19 kernel, GNOME 50 Wayland-only, and an archive any engineer can mirror to their own infrastructure.
The Fedora Project shipped Fedora Linux 44 on April 28, five days after Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support (LTS) "Resolute Raccoon." This is first time happening as generally Ubuntu's release follows Fedora.
My recent article on Canonical's Snap Devpacks explained the cage Canonical built on top of that release. This piece is the counterpoint. Fedora 44 ships a default desktop with a 6.19 kernel (not 7.0 as Ubuntu), GNOME 50 (the version that finally drops X11 entirely), KDE Plasma 6.6 on the Spin, RPM 6.0, full Dandified Yellowdog Updater Modified version 5 (DNF5), Wine NTSYNC auto-loaded on Steam install, Whisper voice input, and Nix as a dnf install away. Nothing in that list ships from a private server. Every piece is mirrorable, forkable, and signed by a key you can verify.
This is not a release-party article. I am not telling you Fedora 44 is perfect. The release notes themselves admit that two installer bugs shipped as accepted waivers, and that the Red Hat Quality Assurance (QA) team has shrunk during the release cycle. International Business Machines (IBM) owns Red Hat. Red Hat funds Fedora. The community holds technical authority but not economic authority. That tension is the second half of this article.
I have been running Fedora 44 for a while before the final release. Let me start with what is in the box.
