Fedora 45 Beta: What's New and How to Try It
Fedora 45 Beta came out on 15 September 2026. The final release is planned for 20 October, with 27 October as the fallback date, according to Phoronix. The beta is where the changes are settled enough to test, and it is the right moment to find out whether anything on your machine breaks.
What changes in the system
- Console. KMSCON replaces the console that ran inside the kernel.
- Installer. Stratis storage support arrives in the Anaconda installer.
- Security defaults. ptrace is restricted by default, and signature checking is enforced by default. Package builds are also meant to be reproducible.
- Kernel problems. DRM Panic gives a clearer screen when the kernel graphics driver hits a fault.
These are defaults, so most people will not see a difference until something they relied on behaves differently. A tool that uses ptrace to inspect another process is the kind of thing to check first.
Versions it ships
Fedora 45 Beta includes GNOME 51 for Workstation, Go 1.27, Python 3.15, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.44, LLVM 23 and RPM 6.1, as listed in the Phoronix announcement.
Apple Silicon
The Fedora Asahi Remix 45 beta adds out-of-the-box support for Apple M3 Macs. Full GPU driver support will come later through an update, according to Born City's coverage.
How to try it
- Download the beta from the Fedora download page and write it to a USB stick, or create a virtual machine (our VirtualBox guide walks through one).
- Boot the live image and check your hardware: Wi-Fi, GPU, sound, suspend and any external display.
- If you install it, use a spare disk or a partition you can wipe. A beta is not the system to run your daily work on. If the disk holds anything you need, make a backup first, for example with Timeshift or your usual tool.
- When the final release is out, the upgrade guide explains the in-place upgrade from Fedora 44. If you prefer an offline upgrade, the offline guide covers that path.
If you are installing Fedora from scratch, the Fedora 44 installation guide walks through the same installer steps, and the package managers comparison explains how dnf compares with the rest.
JM Carreira
I’ve used Linux since 2008 and it has been my main system since 2021. When an article has a “Tested on” box, I ran the steps on my Lenovo Tiny. More about me and the test machine.