Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Powered by Linux kernel 7.0, Fyra Labs has released Ultramarine 44, the latest version of its Fedora-based distribution, which offers a comprehensive out-of-the-box experience and multiple desktop editions while preserving compatibility with Fedora’s package base.
A key feature is the Plasma edition, shipping with the latest KDE Plasma 6.7. The Budgie edition now uses Wayland, adopts SDDM, and includes a new Bluetooth application.
However, users upgrading from Ultramarine 43 will need to follow the project’s manual migration instructions, as the developers decided not to automatically move existing installations to SDDM for stability reasons.
The GNOME edition includes several usability improvements. Ultramarine 44 refines the “Window is Ready” notification for more natural window focus, enables minimize and maximize buttons by default, adds calculator support to overview search, and displays battery percentage in the top panel on laptops.
At the same time, Pop!_Shell has been removed from the GNOME edition because it is no longer maintained. Fyra Labs says users can still install it manually through DNF or try a similar extension, though compatibility may vary.
Beyond the desktop editions, Ultramarine 44 introduces a refreshed release model. While the distribution will continue to align its major releases with Fedora, the team says it plans to ship more features throughout the year as they become ready, instead of holding everything for major version bumps.
Among the upcoming work mentioned are a public preview of Ultramarine Atomic and new hardware ports expected later this summer.
The out-of-box setup experience, Taidan, has been improved as well. Users can now set the system hostname during setup, enable the CachyOS kernel, and activate MTU probing. Nightlight has been removed from the setup flow, and the project has returned to bundled RPMs for traditional installations to simplify the process.
For command-line users, Ultramarine’s umcli tool now includes a Nix installer tweak, accessible via the um tweaks enable nix command. It also supports creating a local bootc derivation, primarily for users testing Ultramarine Atomic.
On the hardware side, the devs are working on Apple Silicon Mac support and have added a way to convert Fedora Asahi Remix installations to Ultramarine. The team says it hopes to provide an installable Asahi image in the future.
It’s also worth noting that Fyra Labs has been working with the ASUS Linux team, and that Ultramarine is now a recommended distribution for ROG devices. Additionally, the distro will soon be available in Raspberry Pi Imager, and the WSL build is planned for the Microsoft Store pending Microsoft’s review.
Existing users can upgrade to Ultramarine 44 via their graphical app stores, such as Discover on Plasma or Software on GNOME, Budgie, and Xfce. Alternatively, the upgrade can be performed through DNF using Fedora’s standard system upgrade process.
For additional details, see the announcement.
