March 14, 2026
Hot Pi, hotter takes
Fedora 44 on the Raspberry Pi 5
Pi Day drop: Fedora 44 boots on Pi 5 — joy, jabs, and heat
TLDR: Fedora 44 now runs on the Raspberry Pi 5 with working graphics and desktops, but key features like NVMe, audio, and thermal controls are still missing and require a manual memory tweak. The crowd is split between impressed tinkerers and critics roasting the Pi’s quirky boot setup and the lack of thermal support.
Fedora 44 just landed on the Raspberry Pi 5, and the comments are sizzling hotter than a tiny ARM chip without a fan. The dev dropped fresh images for Minimal, KDE, and GNOME, with accelerated graphics, Ethernet, Wi‑Fi, and USB all working (though you can’t boot from USB yet). You’ll need one nerdy extra step — adding a memory tweak to the boot settings — and yes, auto‑suspend needs to be disabled. Big pieces like NVMe storage, audio, and thermal controls aren’t ready yet, which lit the fuse.
The community split fast. One camp is cheering — “running full Fedora on the Pi 5 is impressive,” says one user, already dreaming up lightweight desktop apps and wondering how WebKitGTK (the browser engine that powers many apps) will run on ARM. The other camp is…not thrilled. A top‑voted rant calls the Raspberry Pi Foundation “obsessed with weird custom ways,” blasting the lack of standard PC‑style booting (UEFI) and the need to “update the magic boot partition” on newer boards. Another commenter drops the zinger: “The first rule of bringup is thermal support,” dragging the missing fan/heat logic. Meanwhile, a punster steals the show with: “Just another Raspberry Pi HAT ;)” because Fedora. Hat. We get it. The vibes: equal parts applause, eye‑rolls, and meme energy.
Key Points
- •Fedora 44 images for Raspberry Pi 5 are released, timed with Pi Day.
- •Supported and tested features include Pi 5B (revC/revD) variants, microSD OS disk, HDMI with accelerated graphics, wired/wireless networking, and desktops (KDE, GNOME).
- •USB works but cannot be used for OS disks; microSD is the only supported OS disk currently.
- •A CMA kernel parameter (cma=256M@0M-1024M) must be added during image creation and persisted for graphics to work; auto-suspend should be disabled on desktop images.
- •Pending support before Fedora 44 release includes Raspberry Pi 500 series, CM5, NVMe, thermal management, audio, and automatic CMA additions.