Fedora 44 KDE Plasma
Fedora 44 shipped on April 28 2026. I've always known Fedora as the one traditionally driving GNOME development but this release puts KDE in the spotlight!
With Fedora 44, KDE Plasma is now "Fedora Ready"—a fully certified, first-class flagship experience. 🎉
The Good
Fedora ships with the default KDE Plasma Desktop (6.6.4 at release) but it looks and feels exceptionally cohesive, starting right from the new Plasma Login Manager which was super neat. I experienced zero major KDE bugs (the SELinux one doesn't count 😝).
Gaming performance reaches high (likely the NTSYNC kernel sauce enabled by default) allowing for better frame rates in certain games, though it didn't seem to extend to all games. The default application selection feels like what a user's desktop should be. Maybe a bit heavy to some but it comes with all you need at under 5gb installed.
The Bad
Hardware-accelerated video playback remains unpolished out-of-the-box. Fedora ships without patent-encumbered codecs by design, meaning you must self-serve (RPM Fusion) to get full VA-API hardware decode for media playback.
Despite posting high average frame rates, the actual frame pacing felt uneven and lacked smoothness when compared to Ubuntu in the previous delve. Also, nit: SELinux threw errors when I tried to run Podman containers directly from an exFAT drive.
AI Workloads
The AMD XDNA2 NPU on my Geekom A7 MAX remains out of reach. The kernel driver is available but from what I understand, the userspace libs (which let apps like ollama talk to it) are unpackaged on Fedora and Ubuntu. This means, at least for right now, if you want to use hardware acceleration for local AI workloads, you have to use 3rd party sources (ppas/copr).
Overall
Fedora 44 is a solid choice for someone with technical acumen who wants to use (or try out) a grounded distribution of GNU/Linux with an enterprise pedigree. KDE Plasma provides a familiar desktop paradigm and accessibility to power-users that want to control and customize their desktops.
Congratulations to the Fedora team for this release!