Fedora developers have pushed back the final release of Fedora 44 yet again. The new target lands on Tuesday, April 28. That’s two weeks past the original early date of April 14. And one week beyond the first slip to April 21. Outstanding installer crashes and desktop setup glitches forced the call at the latest Go/No-Go meeting. Phoronix first flagged the delay on April 17, citing bugs in non-ASCII keyboard handling, a broken KDE Plasma keyboard layout page, Btrfs installs, and more.
But the story runs deeper. Fedora’s process builds in flexibility. The official schedule lists multiple final targets: early on the 14th, then the 21st, now the 28th. Jef Spaleta announced the April 21 No-Go on the test-announce list, shifting to April 28 after four accepted blockers persisted. Fedora’s key tasks page confirms the current target. Beta hit on March 10, right on time. Final freeze began March 31. Yet here we are.
Those blockers? Mostly installer woes. Bug 2458907 triggers an Anaconda crash—’NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘path’—when storing config files. Over 30 reports piled up. It earned Final Blocker status in the April 16 meeting. Bug 2458901 fares worse: an incomplete spanned Btrfs array blinds Anaconda to the drive, then crashes on rescan. Accepted outright. KDE Plasma setup draws fire too. Bug 2448283 fails fallback for non-ASCII keyboards, skipping US English as secondary. Bug 2453216 mangles pre-selection, defaulting to English US or blank. The QA blocker tracker lists these four accepted, plus three proposed: a dracut tss user gap, ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 LUKS black screen, and RTL8852BE Wi-Fi power_save throttling speeds.
Meeting logs reveal the drama. Adam Williamson kicked off: “we do, indeed, have an RC!” RC-1.2 sat ready. Test matrices checked out. But votes turned. On Bug 2458907, Nirik offered a “weak +1 blocker.” Conan_kudo, Korora, others piled on after report counts surfaced. GRUB error in Bug 2457333? Rejected. Cosmetic, no boot block. Realtek Wi-Fi bust in 2458899? One report, works elsewhere—nixed. LUKS glitches split the room: Dell XPS too niche, ThinkPad punted on a tie. Final tally: No-Go. “!agreed Fedora Linux 44 Final is NO-GO,” adamwill declared. Next meet: April 23. Full logs here.
First delay mirrored this. April 14 No-Go stemmed from Mesa crashes on NVIDIA, Plasma keyboard and Wi-Fi setup fails. Adam Williamson canceled that Go/No-Go: “multiple outstanding blockers and no indication that folks wanted to contemplate waiving them all.” Linuxiac covered it. Now a second slip. They tracked the latest, noting installer stack and Plasma pains.
Reddit lit up. r/Fedora post on the second delay drew cheers for caution. “I prefer delays over bugs,” wrote hwayu_. Dx__ scarred by past rushes: “better than a rush launch.” XzX_z3 praised: “With almost everything today being ‘rush now, fix later’, I’m more than comfortable.” Users run betas fine—Mediocre-Pumpkin6522: no problems since March. But some flag NVIDIA freezes in GNOME 50. Schedule defenders note: delays baked in. Fedora 43 slipped a week, 40 another. 39 took three. Thread here.
So what’s the payoff? Fedora 44 packs heavy upgrades. Workstation ships GNOME 50. KDE unifies on Plasma 6.6, swaps SDDM for Plasma Login Manager. Kernel 6.19. GCC 16.1, Binutils 2.46, LLVM 22, Go 1.26, Ruby 4.0, PHP 8.5. Live media tweaks. AArch64 EFI boosts Windows on ARM laptops. Anaconda skips default network profiles. PackageKit rides DNF5. Bootupd handles GRUB/shim. No FUSE 2 in Atomic Desktops. Nix joins as dev tool. ChangeSet wiki details it all.
Delays irk. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS eyes next week untouched. Users itch for fresh bits. But Fedora prioritizes criteria. No waivers rushed. Better a polished April 28 than buggy now. Blockers hit ON_QA—fixes brew. April 23 decides if 28 holds. Or slips again. Fedora ships. Always does. Just not yet.
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