Since last week’s Fedora 44 Beta release I have been testing out this upcoming Fedora Linux version on a few systems in the lab, most notably with the Framework Desktop powered by the powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo”. Fedora Workstation 44 Beta has been looking nice and running stable albeit in some instances seeing lower performance at this point than Fedora Workstation 43 but overall in good shape.
As the first of the Fedora 44 benchmarking, today is a look at the Framework Desktop performance using the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 on Fedora Workstation 43 stock, Fedora Workstation 43 with all stable updates as of this past weekend, and then Fedora Workstation 44 Beta.
The same Framework Desktop hardware was used throughout all the testing with just carrying out clean installs of Fedora Workstation 43/44 as the only changes being made.
Unlike Ubuntu and many other distributions that will stick to the same kernel release for its lifetime, Fedora Linux continues rolling down new stable kernel releases and the like that for Fedora 43 means already matching the same v6.19 kernel base as Fedora 44 Beta. This diminishes some of the performance benefits to upgrading to newer Fedora Linux releases but in any event there were some interesting performance changes discovered when moving from Fedora 43 to Fedora 44 Beta.
Fedora 44 notably shifts from GCC 15 to the GCC 16 compiler, which hasn’t yet seen its official GCC 16.1 stable release. Fedora with their H1 releases continue to be on the leading-edge of shipping new compilers, typically before other prominent Linux distributions.
