Changes in Fedora 44 For Desktop Users

The Fedora Games Lab now uses KDE Plasma as its desktop experience. Existing users who have the previous Xfce-based experience will not be upgraded to this, so a manual update or a fresh install will be required.

The Fedora Games Lab now includes a modernized games and game development tools package set.

Gaming on Fedora documentation has been modernized and greatly expanded on.

The NTSYNC kernel module is now enabled by default for select packages

The NTSYNC kernel module has been enabled by default for users of Wine and Steam (RPM Fusion) packages. It is present on kernel stable versions starting from 6.14. This provides better performance and compatibility for Windows applications running through Wine/Proton (especially games). Currently, this is only available for certain custom Wine/Proton builds, but Fedora is making the kernel module available ahead of the eventual merge in upstream Wine.

Fedora KDE variants (such as the KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, KDE Plasma Mobile Spin, and associated Kinoite variants) now ship with Plasma Login Manager as the default login manager experience.

Users upgrading from older releases of the KDE Plasma Desktop Edition and the KDE Plasma Mobile Spin will retain the previous Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) login manager experience by default.

The following commands are required to switch:

Plasma Login Manager will be used on next reboot.

Fedora KDE variants now provide an integrated out-of-box first-run experience that give the user the opportunity to configure their system post-install. This also enables Fedora KDE variants for OEM deployments.

The Fedora MiracleWM spin has switched its default experience from nwg-shell to DankMaterialShell (built on QuickShell). Users should experience a more fully featured, reliable, snappier, and polished experience.

See link:https://fedoraproject.org/spins/budgie/ for more information about the Fedora Budgie spin.

Fedora Linux now ships Budgie 10.10, the latest release from Buddies of Budgie. Budgie 10.10 offers its users a Wayland-centric user experience, however X11 applications are still supported.

FUSE2 librares and binaries have been removed from all Atomic Desktops. If you have applications (notably AppImages) that depend on those libraries, please update them, consider using the Flatpak version if it exists or ask upstream to update them to the newer AppImage runtime.

On Kinoite and Kinoite Mobile, Plasma Vaults using the EncFS or CryFS backends will no longer be accessible. You can either convert them to another backend before updating or layer the fuse-encfs or cryfs packages via rpm-ostree install to access them on updated systems.

Fedora 44 updates IBus to version 1.5.34, which updates some Wayland and emoji features:

This change provides input-method features in some Wayland desktop environments such as KDE, Sway, Hyprland, and COSMIC, and show users some information for emojis. GNOME does not use the Wayland input-method protocol.

ibus-speech-to-text now supports the WhisperCpp speech recognition engine via pywhispercpp, providing improved accuracy and multilingual support. Specifically: