Fedora Linux

In short: Fedora is a free distribution developed by the community with Red Hat’s support. It brings new technology early but stays well usable.

In more detail: Fedora is the testing ground for later RHEL features. The default edition “Workstation” uses GNOME, alongside there are spins for KDE Plasma, Xfce, Cinnamon and others.

In detail

• Release: every six months, about 13 months of support. Upgrades via dnf system-upgrade.
• Technology: Wayland, PipeWire, Btrfs as default file system, SELinux, Flatpak, DNF.
• Variants: Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Server, CoreOS, IoT, Silverblue/Kinoite (immutable), Asahi (Apple Silicon).
• Role: Linus Torvalds uses Fedora.
• Limitation: patent-encumbered codecs and proprietary drivers only via RPM Fusion.

See also: DNF and RPM (Fedora, RHEL), Linux distributions: family tree