At Red Hat Summit 2026, we’re announcing Fedora Hummingbird — a new container-based rolling Fedora Linux distribution. This distribution provides access to the latest software as soon as it’s available upstream, which ensures that it’s up to date and secure. Fedora Hummingbird primarily utilizes an image-based workflow, similar to containers, but also runs in virtual…
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What does this mean, everything else is not save anymore?
Why do I need a Red Hat Login while the project is declared as a Fedora driven project?
The foundation for Fedora Hummingbird already ships today from the Hummingbird containers repository. You can pull and boot it right now.
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Every new system is more secure than every other new system 
quite a few links not working in the article!!!
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Is calling this Fedora Hummingbird accurate or even allowed under our trademark guidelines? I didn’t think Project Hummingbird was officially integrated into Fedora at all.
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Wow. Frankly, that article sounds hostile to me. It’s basically claiming to be “Fedora Linux”, then again that it is not but that it is secure as opposed to everyone else; with “curated kernel config and elaborate engineering framework”. A whole $$$$-load of sales pitch.
In the end, you find out that to at least 95%, it is Fedora rawhide distributed as a bootc variant; with a kernel from the same source as the rawhide kernel (minus the Fedora patches); plus some apps built as containers (“hummingbird”) in order to get them from upstream directly rather than packaging them “distroless”, which again is just a sales pitch for “no package manager inside”. What’s the runtime?
So it’s something moving faster than rawhide, with updates “gated” by the basic bootc mechanism (ship working images only, apply atomically).
“The team has already started bringing improvements back to Fedora.” So what is it? Fedora or not Fedora?
There might be even some good ideas in there, but given how this started and how it is communicated I can put zero trust in this.
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I was told that Project Hummingbird is “working with the Fedora council to introduce this into the Fedora ecosystem.” [1]
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For me it will be Fedora when the access to it also is allowed over Fedora (FAS), and a sign up to RH is not needed. I am not against Corporate Business, however I would like to have the liberty how deep I want to go back into it.
I would propose that we take such Topics offline as long as the community access is not available.
And the community it selves has nothing to say?
P.S.
Within W7 MS already announced the next OS releases will be as a service. It looks like we are preparing for that in the Linux world and have to silently introduced it within the Fedora Community. Tsssss … Why paying for employees when there is a community which makes it for free!
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I was told that Project Hummingbird is “working with the Fedora council to introduce this into the Fedora ecosystem.” [1]
Discussions about Hummingbird inclusion in the Fedora Project are in the
early stages, but there is no such thing as Fedora Hummingbird. IMHO,
this post should be taken down and reevaluated, as it sounds like there
was a miscommunication about Red Hat’s Hummingbird Project being a
Fedora deliverable.
At Red Hat Summit 2026, we’re announcing Fedora Hummingbird — a new container-based rolling Fedora Linux distribution. This distribution provides access to the latest software as soon as it’s available upstream, which ensures that it’s up to date and secure.
Even from the first sentence, Red Hat Summit is mentioned, which is a
Red Hat marketing event, not a Fedora thing, and it refers to Fedora
Hummingbird as a Fedora Linux distribution which it is not.
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/article-proposal-engage-with-
fedora-community-around-project-hummingbird/189735/3 ↩︎
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Is it really a Linux distribution? AIUI it’s a set of container images tightly oriented to specific purposes. In fact, later in the article they’re even referred to as “distroless container images”.
@council I do hope I didn’t jump the gun by letting this article go through. I was seeing things like a Hummingbird Forgejo repo [1] showing up and I had the impression that this was going forward. Let me know if this should be unpublished.
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Take a look at this devel-list post and thread from a few weeks ago for some background.
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That thread does seem to back up @gotmax23 's point:
Discussions about Hummingbird inclusion in the Fedora Project are in the
early stages, but there is no such thing as Fedora Hummingbird. IMHO,
this post should be taken down and reevaluated, as it sounds like there
was a miscommunication about Red Hat’s Hummingbird Project being a
Fedora deliverable.
It shows IBMRH employees enthusiastic about pushing this forward, but it’s not clear that this has gone through the steps that would make the “Fedora Hummingbird” branding appropriate.
It’s said in the thread that:
The initial goal would be to bring the work into Fedora by creating a Forge account and SIG, while nurturing it under the Fedora Innovation Lifecycle proposal
…but the Fedora Innovation Lifecycle itself is not yet approved and further work on it has been requested by the Council.
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This looks like a great project! 
I have a quick question:
what makes this version special compared to the original Fedora images?
Hey folks! So there has definitely been planning and communication going on with the council around this, but the best-placed person to reply to this is @jspaleta and he’s either on stage or deeply involved in the Summit presentation (I’m not watching the stream so I’m not sure which). If folks could hold on for him to be able to reply here, that’d be awesome. We’ll definitely address all the questions.
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I’ve got the same question about that. After reading, isn’t this a set of hardened distroless containers? Would the approach be to create such distroless containers for Fedora? Note that I also cannot access the quay link listed.
Fedora’s approach is to “default to open”, so it would be good to have these plans and communications publicly shared.
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As former Project Leader, I know that there’s always a tension between transparency and Red Hat’s business and marketing desires to have splashy exciting announcements at Summit. Once that has settled down, the real work can start.
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Hello everyone,
I’m happy to address questions as I can, but I may be a little delayed today.
Off the top…
Fedora Hummingbird has received Trademark Approval via Council.
With regard to the link access in the magazine article… that’s a technical mistake, Please hold while that gets worked out.
This link should work for everyone
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