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Fedora is a Linux distribution which is fund and supported by Red Hat. Fedora is said to be the upstream source of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. All the software shipped with standard Fedora installation and from official Fedora repositories are licensed under free and open-source licenses, but proprietary software can also be installed from RPM Fusion repositories.
Release
Fedora has a release cycle of 6 months and a maintenance cycle of 13 months. Since it is updated frequently, it will be at the leading edge of technology and is said to be working closely with the upstream Linux communities. There are 3 main editions for every new release of fedora, Workstation, Server and Atomic. Each of the editions are for different purposes. The general desktop version is Fedora Workstation, which defaults with a GNOME desktop, but also has many different desktop editions called the Fedora Spins.
The official spins for fedora can be found here and the desktops supported are KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, and more. There is also Fedora Spins for special purposes and can be found here in Fedora Labs.
Package Management
Fedora uses RPM as the package manager and DNF, which is the successor of YUM, as the tool to manage RPM packages. It uses something called the Delta RPM to update installed packages which download only the change or difference rather than downloading the complete new version of the package. Which reduces update time by reducing the download size.
Official Website - https://getfedora.org/
Latest Stable Release - 28
Default Desktop - GNOME
Architecture - x86_64 (64-bit)
My Thoughts
I use Fedora as my primary desktop operating system, because the as a RPM based Linux distribution it has a very popular support from developers. Also that RPM distributions are only second to Debian in terms of popularity, so it is very rare that a software which is available to Linux that doesn't have an RPM package. It has a very easy installation interface Anaconda, so up and running a fully functional workstation is just minutes away. And I like the value that RPM Fusion brings to fedora. As you can see in the screen shot below RPM Fusion adds more than a 1000 additional packages for installing. Many of my proprietary software comes from the RPM Fusion repositories, which include Dropbox, Steam, Kdenlive, etc.
Pros
- DNF - excellent rpm manager tool
- RPM Fusion - brings the most useful and famous software to me
- RPM based distros are only second to Debian distros in terms of support and popularity.
SE Linux- ultimate security tool for Linux- Up to date technology in new primary releases
- Lightweight - comes in 1.4 GB installation disk image
Cons
Need to install new version or update every 6 months
Setting up the newly installed system is a time consuming process
Check out how I setup my system after a fresh fedora installation here
Cannot use as a stable long term operating system without going through a major update for more than 13 months
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