The state of Fedora in 2026 [LWN.net]

LWN<br>.net<br>News from the source

Content Weekly Edition<br>Archives<br>Search<br>Kernel<br>Security<br>Events calendar<br>Unread comments

LWN FAQ<br>Write for us

User:<br>Password: |

Log in /<br>Subscribe /<br>Register

The state of Fedora in 2026

[LWN subscriber-only content]

Welcome to LWN.net

The following subscription-only content has been made available to you<br>by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the<br>best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this<br>article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you<br>for visiting LWN.net!

By Joe Brockmeier<br>June 16, 2026

Flock

On June 15 at Fedora's Flock conference, held in<br>Prague, Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta delivered a short "State of<br>Fedora" keynote that provided a bit of insight into the status of the<br>project. Topics included the overall growth for Fedora usage, ways to increase<br>contributions, and an alarming decline in the number of active packagers working<br>on the project.

I did not attend Flock this year but I did watch the live stream; the unedited video is available<br>now, and edited videos should be published soon. Spaleta's slides are not yet<br>available, but are expected to be posted to the session<br>page at any time.

Good, bad, weird

Spaleta is now in his second year as FPL; he began the talk by<br>alluding to that fact, and commented that it still felt weird to be<br>called the FPL. He said he would show "some good things, bad<br>things, and a weird thing" related to the state of Fedora.

Fedora usage fell into the "good" category. Overall, Fedora usage continues to<br>climb; he showed a slide that tracked the number of systems that were<br>"seen" for each of Fedora's variants (22 in all). The graph indicated<br>that almost all of the variants showed increasing usage over time;<br>Spaleta said that there had been almost one million systems checking<br>in, according to the "Count Me" system, in the past week. That meant a<br>nine percent increase in the last year. This article<br>on the Fedora Magazine blog explains how Fedora's tracking system works, as<br>well as how to disable it if one does not wish to be counted.

Fedora KDE Plasma, which was recently promoted from a Fedora Spin to a full edition, showed<br>"super year-over-year growth", he said. In the past week, it had more than<br>158,000 systems checking in, for more than 120% growth compared to last year. He<br>speculated that was due to its promotion but he couldn't be sure.

Fedora Workstation, the<br>project's GNOME-based edition, also showed year-over-year growth, but of a more<br>modest sort. In the past week, the project had tracked about 297,000 systems, or 18.8%<br>growth in the past year. Fedora counted about 167,000 image-based systems in the last<br>week, which includes all of its Atomic Desktops as well as Fedora CoreOS. Spaleta's<br>chart showed a 30.5% increase in usage from last year. The bulk of that growth, he<br>said, is attributed to CoreOS; the project identified about 146,000 live CoreOS<br>systems in the past week.

The "weird" lies in the active system reports for the Cloud edition. While most of the graphs<br>Spaleta displayed showed a consistent upward trend, the Cloud graph was closer to<br>spiky abstract art than a coherent usage pattern. All told, if the collected<br>statistics are accurate, there were nearly 65% fewer systems<br>active—about 75,000—in the past week than a year<br>ago. He said that it had indicated a number of systems had shown up<br>"instantly as 25 weeks old", and that he didn't understand the<br>graph at all.

He also covered "Fedora visitors": that is, Fedora-based distributions, such<br>Bazzite from the Universal Blue project and the Asahi Remix, which are tracked in<br>the Count Me statistics as well. There were about 97,000 visitor systems counted in the past<br>week, for a year-over-year growth of more than 210%. Spaleta said that those<br>distributions are part of Fedora's larger ecosystem, "and when they do well, we do<br>well. I would like to find ways to bring them closer to us".

Disappearing packagers

"Here's where we get to the not-so-great part", Spaleta said<br>while displaying a graph (reproduced below) that tracked Fedora<br>packagers by month in 2020, 2023, and 2026 so far. The graph indicates<br>some decline throughout 2020, a steeper decline in 2023, and even<br>steeper decline in 2026. "It's only four months, but it's a pretty<br>straight line, that is concerning.".

At the beginning of 2020 there were more than 420 package<br>committers, and the year closed with slightly fewer packagers. In<br>2023, Fedora had about 410 packagers at the beginning of the year, but<br>ended with fewer than 340. It began this year with about 350, and is<br>now at about 325 packagers.

He said he was unsure what the reasons were for the decline, or<br>exactly how to solve it. "It could be that we need to double down<br>on outreach, or the new normal for us may be that we need to do more<br>with less." Spaleta said it may be that there is a need to<br>automate more work, and that packaging was less...