Fedora Linux 45 released with Stratis support in the Anaconda installer
Fedora Linux 45 shipped November 3 with Stratis in the Anaconda installer — pools, snapshots and encryption at install time — plus GNOME 51 and kernel 7.2.
Fedora Linux 45 shipped on November 3, 2026, two missed release dates later. The change with the widest reach is in the installer: Anaconda now integrates Stratis, Red Hat’s enterprise local-storage stack, so storage pools, snapshots and encryption can be configured during installation instead of being assembled from separate tools afterwards. Workstation ships GNOME 51 on top of the Linux 7.2 kernel.
Key points
- Release scope: the Fedora Project announced Fedora Linux 45 on 2026-11-03. Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, Cloud, CoreOS and IoT editions ship the same day as the Atomic desktops, including Silverblue and Kinoite.
- Stratis in the installer: Anaconda custom partitioning can build Stratis pools with dynamic-size / and /home filesystems, and Kickstart gains
autopart --type=stratisplus newstratispoolandstratisfscommands. Until now, Stratis could not be installed as the root filesystem without unsupported manual workarounds. - The base: Linux 7.2 kernel, with 7.3 expected to roll out soon per Phoronix, GNOME 51 and KDE Plasma 6.8, and toolchains including Python 3.15, Go 1.27, GCC 16.2, LLVM 23, glibc 2.44 and RPM 6.1.
Background
Fedora 45 was originally aimed at October. Two Go/No-Go votes in a row returned No-Go: the first rejection came in mid-October, and the second, on October 22, pushed the release out at least one more week. The final tag landed on November 3, and Phoronix covered both rejections.
Stratis has a longer history. Red Hat built it after dropping Btrfs from RHEL: a management layer over device-mapper, XFS and LUKS. The packages have been in Fedora since Fedora 28, but the root filesystem stayed off limits — the change proposal, as Phoronix quotes it, called the old routes “manual, unsupported workarounds”. The installer integration came out of a proposal by Red Hat engineer Vojtech Trefny, whose stated goal was to make Stratis “a bootable, installer-supported solution for Fedora.”
On the kernel side, we covered Linux 7.3 when it came out on October 18. Phoronix reports the 7.3 update will reach Fedora 45 soon, so upgraded systems will pick it up through normal updates.
The facts
The components that make up Fedora 45, each checkable in the announcements:
| Component | Fedora 45 | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Release date | 2026-11-03 | Official announcement |
| Kernel | Linux 7.2, 7.3 to follow | Phoronix |
| Workstation desktop | GNOME 51 | Red Hat blog |
| KDE desktop | Plasma 6.8 | Red Hat blog |
| Toolchains | Python 3.15, Go 1.27, GCC 16.2, glibc 2.44, LLVM 23, RPM 6.1 | Phoronix, Red Hat |
| Installer | Anaconda WebUI, default on Atomic editions | Red Hat blog |
Python 3.15 is the same release we covered separately in October (Python 3.15); Fedora 45’s toolchain follows it.
Stratis works through both install paths. In the Anaconda WebUI, custom partitioning can launch the Cockpit storage module to build pools across drives and lay down dynamic-size / and /home filesystems. In Kickstart, autopart takes --type=stratis, and stratispool and stratisfs are new commands. Stratis itself provides thin provisioning (over-provisioning), storage pools, dynamic filesystem sizing, snapshots and encryption.
Other changes worth checking against your setup: RPM 6.1 enforces package signature verification by default — unsigned packages refuse to install unless explicitly overridden. ptrace is restricted for unprivileged users, with a sysctl to restore it when debug packages are installed. chpasswd and newusers go through PAM and inherit password complexity and audit policy. The NetworkManager vpnc and fortisslvpn plugins are retired starting with this release, so migrate if you still use them. The in-kernel text console is replaced by the userspace kmscon, which The Register credits with proper Unicode, multiseat, more than 16 colors and Ctrl+Plus text zoom. Fedora CoreOS gains zram compression and systemd-oomd, and support for Snapdragon X laptops improves in this release.
What others say
Phoronix is watching Stratis adoption rather than celebrating it: Workstation’s default root filesystem is still Btrfs, and how the two compare in practice is the question they leave open.
The Register called the console swap the beta’s “biggest surprise” — kmscon was announced in 2012, changed maintainers more than once, and only reached a shipping release after the original team resumed work last year.
One Fedora contributor, writing as supakeen, published a walkthrough of the release pipeline before the launch, where it reached 158 points on Hacker News: builds start in clean Koji chroots, Bodhi gates updates on karma, Pungi composes the release set, openQA tests the images. His line: “Every build starts from a clean room. You can never get a different result because someone installed something on the builder last week.”
One attribution note: IT之家, a Chinese outlet, says the release covers all six main editions. The official announcement says support was built into Anaconda, and Red Hat’s post does not mention Stratis at all. Anaconda is the installer those editions share, but treat Stratis’s per-edition coverage as unconfirmed until the release notes settle it.
Our take
Who should move now: anyone installing servers, IoT devices or fleets from Kickstart. Storage pools, snapshots and encryption can now be declared in ks.cfg, and a machine comes up with the layout you wanted instead of needing a post-install LVM session. That is the most concrete engineering win in this release. Workstation users can follow their usual upgrade rhythm; GNOME 51 and kernel 7.2 are routine updates by Fedora standards.
For workstations, Stratis is about having an entrance rather than a new default: snapshots and thin provisioning are selectable at install time for the first time, but Btrfs remains the Workstation default, and Phoronix treats the comparison as unresolved. Evaluate Stratis on a VM or a test machine before committing to it.
Two honest catches. The installer integration is a first release that shipped after two delays, so for production-critical machines it is reasonable to wait for a 45.x point release. And upgrading does not migrate existing disks to Stratis — machines keep their current layout until you plan a move yourself.
How to try it
On Fedora 43 or 44, follow the documented dnf system-upgrade flow: fully update the current system, download the release 45 package set, and reboot into it. For fresh installs, grab an ISO from fedoraproject.org. To try Stratis, pick it in custom partitioning during install, or write autopart --type=stratis in your Kickstart.