Fedora 45 Candidate Beta-1.3 dropped on September 5, 2026, as the third and final coordinated test release before the official launch. The build delivers massive toolchain jumps like GCC 16.2, Python 3.15, and RPM 6.1, plus a new web-based installer for the Silverblue and Kinoite editions. However, ISO sizes are already pushing past their limits on several images, and three beta blockers remain open, including a Plasma login crash and a kmscon null pointer error. If the community cannot resolve these issues by Wednesday's deadline, the release schedule will slip by an additional week.

Fedora Linux 45 Beta-1.3 Drops for Testing, But ISO Sizes and Three Blockers Lurk

The third candidate beta of Fedora 45 is out, and it's the last coordinated test release before the final drop. Compose Fedora-45-20260905.0 landed on September 5, 2026, giving the community a chance to stress-test a code-complete snapshot before the release gate closes.

The build supports x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x. You'll find images for Workstation, Server, Cloud, Silverblue, Kinoite, and COSMIC Atomic. Spins cover Xfce, SoaS, KDE Mobile, i3, Sway, and Budgie. Labs include Astronomy, Design, Games, and Security. It's a comprehensive offering, though the ISO size failures suggest something is stretching the limits.

Major Changes and Toolchain Upgrades

The toolchain is jumping. GCC 16.2 ships alongside glibc 2.44, Python 3.15, Go 1.27, and Perl 5.44. LLVM is up to 23. RPM moved to 6.1, which enforces signature checking by default. You won't be able to install unsigned packages without jumping through hoops.

Security hardening is aggressive. ptrace is restricted by default for unprivileged users. kmscon replaces the kernel fbcon as the default virtual terminal console. This change is supposed to be more secure and feature-rich, though it's already caused a NULL pointer dereference bug that's currently blocking the beta.

Atomic desktops get a shiny new installer. Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite now ship with a web-based Anaconda instead of the old GTK one. Remote installation over HTTPS with pin-based auth is supported. Stratis storage is also live in Anaconda, including Kickstart and Cockpit Storage editor integration.

Podman 6 drops deprecated components like slirp4netns and cgroups v1. MySQL jumped to 9.7, MariaDB to 12.3, and Ruby on Rails to 8.1. Pandas 3 brings Copy-on-Write behavior. OpenSSH 4.0 is listed but reportedly not being worked on yet. That's a notable gap.

ISO Bloat and Open Blockers

If you're keeping score, there are three open Beta blockers. The Plasma login black screen bug is critical. The kmscon NULL deref is verified but still open. Anaconda's Bugzilla reporting failure hinders QA, though it won't stop installation.

Image sanity tests are flagging size failures. The Everything boot image for aarch64 hit 1.39 GB, well over the 1.30 GB limit. x86_64 came in at 1.31 GB. Server boot images on both architectures are also over the line. Several spin ISOs are exceeding their caps too. This suggests package bloat is creeping in, likely from the libxml2 2.15 mass rebuild and other updates.

The release schedule has a contingency. If all Beta criteria aren't met by Wednesday at 20:00 UTC prior to release day, the whole thing slides a week. Keep in mind that means every downstream task shifts by seven days.

Head here to the Fedora 45 Beta-1.3 test results summary. The blocker bug dependency tree is up on Bugzilla. If you want to run validation tests, the release validation test plan covers the checklist. Community chat is on Matrix under #quality:fedoraproject.org.

Head here to download the release.