After two delays, Fedora 45 is finally finished, bringing GNOME 51 and Plasma 6.8

A delayed release arrives

Fedora 45 follows two delays of a week each, after the team encountered issues shortly before release. Its schedule contrasts with Ubuntu’s fixed calendar approach, favoring a release when the software is ready.

The release has six main editions, five immutable desktop variants and 12 spins with different graphical interfaces. Workstation 45 includes GNOME 51, while Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop comes with KDE Plasma 6.8.

Desktop updates and choices

GNOME 51 brings changes including improvements to the Settings app, along with the removal of support for some older Nvidia GPUs. The GNOME and KDE flagship environments are now Wayland-only.

Seven of Fedora’s 12 official spins continue to offer X.org: Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, i3, LXQt, LXDE and Sugar, also known as SOAS. The Atomic Desktops, Fedora’s immutable variants, share a new web-based installer.

Changes beneath the surface

Fedora 45 uses RPM 6.1, which strengthens package-signature checks and prevents package vendors from changing silently. The GNOME keyring now uses the oo7 secrets manager, while two old VPN plugins were removed because their packages were no longer maintained.

The release includes Stratis 3.9.3, a storage system that combines XFS, LVM and kernel device-mapper functions. Stratis aims to provide features such as copy-on-write snapshots and management of logical volumes across multiple devices, using GPL-licensed code.

Kernel starts near end of life

Fedora 45 ships with kernel 7.2.15, the final version in a short-term kernel series that has reached end of life. The delayed timing created a contrast with Ubuntu 26.10, which shipped with a pre-release kernel. Fedora routinely updates releases to newer kernel versions, so Fedora 45 users are expected to receive kernel 7.3 soon.