Fedora 44 Gnome review - We're not in Kansas anymore

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Fedora 44 Gnome review - We're not in Kansas anymore

Updated: June 15, 2026

Recently, I've had a rather unusual streak of decent luck with Linux. My Kubuntu machines are<br>behaving nicely, and my latest review of the<br>26.04 LTS showed some good results. Optimism, what. Yes. Buoyed<br>by this unexpected bag of fortune, I decided to do some more distro testing. Sure, over the last few<br>years, I've significantly minimized my involvement in this space, but now and then, the mood<br>strikes.

Today, I'd like to take a look at Fedora 44, Gnome edition. There's the whole only-Wayland thing,<br>which is a terrible thing for the Linux desktop long term, but never mind that for the moment.<br>Perchance Fedora does offer nice, redeeming features. Perhaps I may not be so averse to the Gnome<br>desktop and its anti-ergonomic stance. Perhaps. Overall, I found the current minus two version to be<br>okayish, so maybe, maybe there's hope. Let us commence gingerly forward.

Installation

The setup was, hm, okay. The new installer is better than the old one, but it has weird defaults. It<br>offers a separate boot, but not a separate home. Why. And the elements do not visually align ever so.<br>The installer also tries to default to your locale, and switches languages automatically. Miss me with<br>this modern nonsense. Software interfaces should be in English, and I'm saying that as a person who<br>speaks 9,000 languages.

The installation took about 15 minutes on battery power. Not bad. But then, at the end of it, you<br>get a feedback option, and it's a<br>QR code no less! A shitty QR code. On the desktop! The URL is right there.<br>Why would I want to use my "phone" to scan a stupid pictogram to be able to answer a survey or some<br>such, when I can simply copy the URL right there (or even click on it), and do the thing on a big<br>screen, with all the comfort and ergonomics of a normal, full-keyboard-and-mouse UI? Why promote this<br>"modern" monkey-tap solution? To what end? To help big tech normalize QR code scanning so that we all<br>get chimpy one day verifying ourselves to our digital overlords every day? Dear nerds, remember, when<br>Dystopia fully engulfs the world, and you have no more freedom, remember my words. You will only have<br>yourself and your own QR code scanning to blame.

And we jump right into a monumental software management fail

I'm skipping the usual parts, because let me show you something tremendously bad.

There's so much wrong here that I don't even know where to begin. Okay, remember my<br>Fedora 42 review? Remember what I also mentioned in my<br>Wayland performance article?<br>Bad news, nothing has changed since. Gnome Software is still dangerously buggy as the last time.

When you set up your account, Fedora asks you to enable certain third-party repositories. These<br>include FlatHub for Flatpaks, in addition to Fedora's Flatpaks (talk about redundancy and confusing),<br>some PyCharm thingie from COPR, Nvidia and Steam repos from RPM Fusion, and Google Chrome from the<br>official repo.

So far so good? Yes? Well ... Let's search for Google Chrome, the world's must used browser.<br>What does Software give you? The official Google's article? Nope! You get the third-party,<br>unofficially-wrapped Flatpak from FlatHub! Now, think about it for a second. If you disable FlatHub, no<br>Chrome, at all.

Tons of unrelated stuff, but let's ignore that for a second.

Look at that note: "This wrapper is not ..." but it is offered by Software! And<br>it's the only option. Under Install, it reads FlatHub, but there's no other option. The official Google<br>repo package is not shown. Nope.

Here, FlatHub is disabled, but do you get Google's stuff? No. And also, many other things, all gone,<br>too!

I installed Chrome on the command line, from Google's OFFICIAL repository, using dnf. If you specify<br>just google-chrome, it will install the Canary version, go figure. But no matter, I installed both that<br>and the stable edition. I then opened Software again, and looked what it says. Under Google Chrome, it<br>says 0 installed, even though it's right there, right there! I guess only Flatpaks matter, right!

Apparently, not only is the tool's backend broken or buggy, it serves unofficial software. FOR THE<br>WORLD'S MOST POPULAR BROWSER! Even though, even though, Fedora has explicitly added Google's repo<br>there! But I guess, "we" need to "convince" the world that Flatpaks are the best thing ever, much like<br>Wayland is the best thing ever, especially if you make it the default and no alternative. 100% of<br>people who have no choice use the no-choice option, yay!

But yeah, let me summarize that, to fully hone in the message:

Recently, there have been dozens of hacks of prominent open-source projects.

There have been breaches of

thousands of GitHub repos, mostly npm stuff, ergo Javascript, which also happens to be the<br>language used...