Fedora 45 beta hardens package signing and desktop secrets

Fedora Linux 45 Beta arrived on Tuesday 15 September, and the project is inviting testers to download or upgrade from its usual mirrors ahead of the final release.

Signing and secrets tightened

The most consequential change is a stricter default: Fedora 45 now requires valid package signatures before installation, so unsigned packages can no longer be installed by accident. Desktop secret management has also been standardised on oo7 across environments, replacing the older backends that included GNOME Keyring and KWallet.

A new console and fresh toolchains

Fedora 45 replaces the legacy in-kernel console with kmscon, which the project says brings smoother rendering, better Unicode and font support, and improved system stability. The release also ships a batch of new versions, including Podman 6, Pandas 3, MySQL and MariaDB, with early access to updated toolchains and runtimes including Python 3.15, Go 1.27, GCC 16.2 and glibc 2.44.

Atomic desktops and installer work

Atomic Desktop ISO builds now use image-builder, and Anaconda gains initial WebUI installation flows for Atomic desktops alongside native support for partitioning Stratis filesystems. Fedora CoreOS picks up systemd-oomd and zram swap support. The project notes that MiracleWM, the Budgie Atomic image and the Sway Atomic image are not part of this beta.

Our opinion

Betas are for finding problems rather than for daily drivers, but this is a good cycle to help test because two of Fedora 45's changes alter default behaviour. Refusing unsigned packages will catch people who sideload RPMs out of habit, and that is precisely the kind of breakage a beta exists to surface before it reaches stable users. Swapping the legacy desktop secret backends for oo7 is deeper plumbing still, and plumbing is where regressions hide longest. If you have a spare machine, a virtual machine or a container host, the effort you spend now is the effort someone else does not have to spend in November.