u/Venomenn

Hey everyone, with Fedora 44 officially releasing next week on April 14th, I wanted to put together a quick breakdown of what this means for Bazzite. Since Bazzite rebases on Fedora's atomic builds, we are essentially getting a major engine upgrade under the hood very soon.

Here are the biggest changes and why they matter for our PCs and handhelds:

1. NTSync natively integrated: This is probably the most important change for Linux gaming right now. Fedora 44 is shipping with the NTSync kernel module enabled out of the box. It essentially mimics Windows NT synchronization, which heavily reduces CPU overhead in Proton and Wine. If you're playing CPU-bound Windows games, you should see smoother framerates and less stuttering once Bazzite pulls this in. Some games already reported up to 30 -500% increase in performnace.
NTSync is going to be massive guys! Here are some first numbers for you:

• Dirt 3: Jumped from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS (678% improvement).
• Tiny Tina's Wonderlands: Jumped from from 130 FPS to 360 FPS.
• Resident Evil 2: Jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS.
• Call of Juarez: Went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS

2. Plasma Login Manager: Fedora's KDE variants are finally ditching the SDDM for the new Plasma Login Manager. For Bazzite users, this means proper, out-of-the-box support for touchscreens, virtual keyboards, and HDR right at the login screen. It’s going to make the console-like experience feel much more seamless on devices like the Steam Deck or Ally.

3. Fedora Games Lab officially switches to KDE Upstream, the Fedora Games Lab is dropping Xfce to adopt KDE Plasma 6. Bazzite obviously already defaults to KDE, but this shift means Fedora developers are now pouring official time and resources into optimizing Plasma specifically for gaming, Wayland, and VRR. We all benefit from that directly.

4. Under-the-hood Update Improvements Fedora 44 changes how it handles initramfs (moving to mkosi-initrd). It’s a lot of technical backend stuff, but the TL;DR is that Bazzite’s OTA system updates are going to be leaner and more reliable.

Sources: https://www.xda-developers.com/fedora-44-will-automatically-make-your-windows-games-run-faster-no-tweaks-required/

https://www.xda-developers.com/wine-11-rewrites-linux-runs-windows-games-speed-gains/

https://www.linuxteck.com/fedora-linux-44-beta-drops/

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fedora-Linux-44-beta-unifies-the-KDE-Plasma-experience-across-editions.1247587.0.html

https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/2063

The March 2026 numbers just dropped, and Linux is officially sitting at 5.33%.

At first glance, you see the +3.10% change and think, "Oh nice, a solid bump." But we need to talk about the difference between percentage points and the actual percentage increase, because this jump is absolutely HUGE.

Going from 2.23% to 5.33% isn't just a 3% increase. It is a 140% relative increase in the Linux user base in a single month. The Linux gaming population literally more than doubled.

Meanwhile, Windows took a -4.28% hit (dropping to 92.33%). Looking at the breakdown, Arch and Mint are leading the pack, but across the board, this is a massive milestone.

Year of the Linux Desktop might actually be here, folks.