By GhostsAreHaunted
Home pageToday was supposed to mark the day where the next Fedora Linux release was supposed to come out, with many being excited about the new features that this release will bring. Despite the mass excitement in the Fedora and Linux community, the original release date was declared a no-go by a Fedora developer, meaning the official launch was postponed to the 21st of April, 2026. On one hand, users will have to wait a little bit longer for new features, but on the other hand, it will pay off in major stability improvements across the board.
Why was the release delayed?
Fedora version 44 was delayed primarily due to several major bugs that were found in the operating system that could cause major breakage across different setups. This decision was made by Adam Williamson, a Fedora Project member since 2015. These bugs include a kernel level bug where those with a LUKS encrypted drive would experience visual glitching when entering their password on startup. This bug was found by Jiri Eischmann, who decided to use the beta version of the operating system on their system. While this bug is supposedly non-existent when using an external monitor, those without access to one are not going to have a great time if they need the extra security. This bug was confirmed a second time by Petr Sklenar, another beta tester just like the earlier mentioned Jiri Eischmann. This time, the bug was produced on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13, a relatively new and very popular business class laptop. This is where the main reasoning for this delay comes to light. Fedora is a very popular Linux distribution in many businesses and other enterprise environments where security is required, therefore, if Fedora 44 were to be released today with these issues, many of these said enterprises and businesses would not have a very great time.
Four other bugs, deemed "accepted blockers", unlike the previously mentioned bugs, which were "proposed blockers", were also a major reason as to why this new release of Fedora 44 was delayed. Two out of the four blockers relate to keyboard layout issues in the KDE Plasma edition of Fedora, where non-ASCII capable keyboard layouts would not select the US English layout as a second layout. The other issue regarding keyboard layouts is a bug where the pre-selection is broken, and where the plasma-setup application will always show "English (US)", otherwise it will show nothing is the system language is set to something else. One more issue with the plasma-setup application is that where configuring a Wi-Fi network will not work if using the Network pane provided in KDE Plasma.
One more issue that would definitely affect a large number of people is an issue with NVIDIA hardware where a VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST error would occur. This bug was found by Lars Loe in 2025, when Fedora 42 was about to be released. Why was this bug randomly accepted into Fedora 44's hit list? I have no clue. But if this issue is somehow still around, it should be fixed instead of just thrown away.
Soooo.... what now?
In conclusion, this delay will give Fedora developers a bit more time to polish the operating system and fix these bugs. It is best to wait until April 21st, 2026, which is when the release is scheduled to occur.