Fedora 45 Candidate Beta-1.2 Arrives With Stratis, WebUI, and Massive Version Bumps
The second beta compose lands on September 3 with GNOME 51, RPM 6.1, and a few ISO size gremlins.
Fedora Linux 45 Candidate Beta-1.2 is available for testing. The Fedora Project Release Engineering team built compose Fedora-45-20260903.2 on September 3, 2026. This is the second candidate image for the upcoming beta milestone. The beta freeze started around August 25, and the infrastructure freeze runs through mid-September. No new package updates will land in the beta tree until that testing window closes. The full Fedora 45 Beta targets a release in late September or early October.
You can call this a version-bump bonanza. Fedora 45 brings GCC to 16.2, Glibc to 2.44, and Python to 3.15. LLVM lands at 23. OpenSSL 4.0 is rebase in progress. RPM hits 6.1. Binutils jumps to 2.47. Go reaches 1.27. Perl climbs to 5.44. That's a meaningful shift from F44.
Next, the desktop environment. GNOME 51 ships in this beta, matching the upstream GNOME 51 Beta from July. A dedicated test day in August logged 135 passing results across 30 participants. KDE Plasma users get the latest release in the spin variants.
The installer is getting an overhaul. You can now install directly onto Stratis filesystems. That includes Kickstart and WebUI support. Silverblue and Kinoite users get a new web-based installer. The old GTK-based Anaconda drops for those atomic desktops. kmscon replaces fbcon as the default VT console. RPM signature checking is enforced by default. Unprivileged users face tighter ptrace restrictions.
DNF5 defaults shift. Vendor change disabled. RPM repository configs relocate to /usr from /etc. The secret service switches to oo7, dropping KWallet and GNOME Keyring. Bash gets a complete color prompt rewrite. Sequoia handles OpenPGP verification now, supporting post-quantum cryptography. DRM Panic gets a web-based frontend. GRUB EFI supports Confidential Computing with a minimal variant for UEFI UKI booting.
Server packages get major updates too. MySQL defaults to 9.7, up from 8.4. MariaDB moves to 12.3 from 11.8. Podman 6 removes cgroups v1 and BoltDB backend for good. Ruby on Rails sits at 8.1. Pandas hits 3.0.x.
The Issues
It's not all smooth sailing. The ISO size check failed. Several boot images exceed the maximum allowed size. Release Engineering is investigating. The blocker tracker lists 6 open bugs. The anaconda-webui review screen crashes with a NoneType error. A kmscon implementation breaks console initial-setup on ARM minimal installs. A user switching restart failure was rejected for Beta but accepted as a Final blocker.
The "State of Fedora" address at Flock 2026 highlighted a tension. Contributor numbers are declining while adoption climbs. Downstream distros like uBlue, Asahi, and Bazzite are keeping Fedora relevant. Pagure.io has been retired as an active service. Migration to Forgejo-based Fedora Forge is underway. The Bugzilla replacement deadline is September 4. The Fedora Council and FESCo are gathering requirements for a Red Hat Bugzilla successor.
Aurélien Bompard flagged critical deadlines in a weekly report. The "Complete" deadline for F45 Changes required all tracker bugs updated to ON_QA by the freeze.
If you want to help validate the beta, head to the release validation test plan. Current blocker bugs are tracked here. OpenQA results sits here. Head here for the Beta 1.2 summary. All Beta priority test cases must pass to meet the Fedora 45 Beta Release Criteria.
Head here to download the release.
