The state of Fedora in 2026

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On June 15 at Fedora's Flock conference, held in Prague, Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta delivered a short "State of Fedora" keynote that provided a bit of insight into the status of the project. Topics included the overall growth for Fedora usage, ways to increase contributions, and an alarming decline in the number of active packagers working on the project.

I did not attend Flock this year but I did watch the live stream; the unedited video is available now, and edited videos should be published soon. Spaleta's slides are not yet available, but are expected to be posted to the session page at any time.

Good, bad, weird

Spaleta is now in his second year as FPL; he began the talk by alluding to that fact, and commented that it still felt weird to be called the FPL. He said he would show "some good things, bad things, and a weird thing" related to the state of Fedora.

Fedora usage fell into the "good" category. Overall, Fedora usage continues to climb; he showed a slide that tracked the number of systems that were "seen" for each of Fedora's variants (22 in all). The graph indicated that almost all of the variants showed increasing usage over time; Spaleta said that there had been almost one million systems checking in, according to the "Count Me" system, in the past week. That meant a nine percent increase in the last year. This article on the Fedora Magazine blog explains how Fedora's tracking system works, as well as how to disable it if one does not wish to be counted.

Fedora KDE Plasma, which was recently promoted from a Fedora Spin to a full edition, showed "super year-over-year growth", he said. In the past week, it had more than 158,000 systems checking in, for more than 120% growth compared to last year. He speculated that was due to its promotion but he couldn't be sure.

Fedora Workstation, the project's GNOME-based edition, also showed year-over-year growth, but of a more modest sort. In the past week, the project had tracked about 297,000 systems, or 18.8% growth in the past year. Fedora counted about 167,000 image-based systems in the last week, which includes all of its Atomic Desktops as well as Fedora CoreOS. Spaleta's chart showed a 30.5% increase in usage from last year. The bulk of that growth, he said, is attributed to CoreOS; the project identified about 146,000 live CoreOS systems in the past week.

The "weird" lies in the active system reports for the Cloud edition. While most of the graphs Spaleta displayed showed a consistent upward trend, the Cloud graph was closer to spiky abstract art than a coherent usage pattern. All told, if the collected statistics are accurate, there were nearly 65% fewer systems active—about 75,000—in the past week than a year ago. He said that it had indicated a number of systems had shown up "instantly as 25 weeks old", and that he didn't understand the graph at all.

He also covered "Fedora visitors": that is, Fedora-based distributions, such Bazzite from the Universal Blue project and the Asahi Remix, which are tracked in the Count Me statistics as well. There were about 97,000 visitor systems counted in the past week, for a year-over-year growth of more than 210%. Spaleta said that those distributions are part of Fedora's larger ecosystem, "and when they do well, we do well. I would like to find ways to bring them closer to us".

Disappearing packagers

"Here's where we get to the not-so-great part", Spaleta said while displaying a graph (reproduced below) that tracked Fedora packagers by month in 2020, 2023, and 2026 so far. The graph indicates some decline throughout 2020, a steeper decline in 2023, and even steeper decline in 2026. "It's only four months, but it's a pretty straight line, that is concerning.".

At the beginning of 2020 there were more than 420 package committers, and the year closed with slightly fewer packagers. In 2023, Fedora had about 410 packagers at the beginning of the year, but ended with fewer than 340. It began this year with about 350, and is now at about 325 packagers.

He said he was unsure what the reasons were for the decline, or exactly how to solve it. "It could be that we need to double down on outreach, or the new normal for us may be that we need to do more with less." Spaleta said it may be that there is a need to automate more work, and that packaging was less interesting to newer contributors. He thought that it might be a "generational switchover" but he did not want to just throw darts at the problem by guessing. "I want to solve the problem".

He was not sure what the solution could be, but he did have some thoughts. "I'm the FPL, I can't not have thoughts on this." Unfortunately, he said, he would share his thoughts with the audience. Spaleta said that Fedora needed to modernize its contributor experience. The transition from Fedora's homegrown Pagure collaboration platform to Fedora Forge, which is based on the Forgejo GitHub-like "software forge", will be "a big leap forward" for the project in that regard by standardizing on workflows people expect for open-source development.

In addition, Spaleta said that Fedora needed to modernize how its governance works, and improve its outreach to new contributors in a more programmatic way. "We don't necessarily have the resources to do that right now. We need to expand resources." He noted that there is a group looking into a way to take in donations, "to broaden support beyond what Red Hat can do with its budget". The council is hoping to do an experiment with Open Collective, he said, and work on creating a framework to rebuild Fedora's global outreach program. LWN covered early discussion about this in March 2026.

He also complained that Fedora tends to "frontload a lot of discussion and get things perfect" before trying experiments. He said he didn't want to use the word "bikeshedding" but then added "it's bikeshedding": to curb that, Spaleta has proposed an innovation lifecycle process that was inspired by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox. The idea behind the proposal is to have a "sandbox" for innovations that are "too big" for Fedora's usual change process.

He said that an innovation process was necessary at this stage, especially now that multiple vendors depend on Fedora; AWS and Microsoft now have Fedora-based Linux distributions (Amazon Linux and Azure Linux, respectively). Spaleta has submitted the proposal to the council, and there is a plan to have a formal discussion and decision on it after Flock.

Hummingbird

He also briefly mentioned Fedora Hummingbird. Spaleta said it was an "innovative approach to build an operating system" that relies on automation; it would have been an obvious fit for the innovation sandbox, but the sandbox did not exist yet.

Hummingbird, which is described as a container-based, rolling Fedora distribution, has been a bit controversial; not the idea itself, necessarily, but the way it was rolled out. The idea had been raised by Scott McCarty on the Fedora development list at the end of April. It was received with interest, and some confusion, about how it would differ from other Fedora variants. McCarty said that the plan was to bring Hummingbird in under the innovation lifecycle proposal, and said in his last message on the subject on May 1 that he was looking forward to more discussions about Hummingbird.

Those discussions did not happen, and Hummingbird was not formally proposed to the project via a public ticket. Instead, a request was submitted to the council privately to approve the usage of the Fedora trademark. The council voted in favor of this in secret in order to expedite the process so it could be announced during Red Hat Summit in May as an official Fedora initiative.

Q&A

The first question from the audience was about the decline in packager contributions; an attendee wanted to know what the split was like between Red Hat employees and non-Red Hat employees. Spaleta said that it was a good question, but he was unable to answer it; the graph had been generated the day before, and he had not had time to dig into more detail.

Another attendee questioned the theory that the decline was due to "generational switchover" since no one at Flock looked as if they were close to retirement. Spaleta responded that getting a "why" out of data is very difficult. "We'd need to reach out to people who've stopped and ask them." He thought that part of the problem in attracting new contributors was that "the goalposts have creeped". What Fedora considers high-quality now is a higher bar than in the early days of the project. "We have to have space for people who are doing skills development." He also said that the sandbox process would be good to allow contributors to do things "that are not good" and provide an opportunity to feel like part of the project while improving their skills. With that, the session ran out of time.

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