Fedora

About the project

The Fedora Project was launched in 2003 as a community-driven replacement for the discontinued Red Hat Linux. It is sponsored by Red Hat — which provides funding, infrastructure and full-time maintainers — but governed by an elected Fedora Council and shaped by hundreds of volunteer contributors. The project's Four Foundations describe what it tries to be: Freedom, Friends, Features, First.

Practically, Fedora is one of the more forward-looking mainstream distributions. New technologies that later become standard across Linux — systemd, Wayland by default, PipeWire as the audio stack, Btrfs as the default filesystem on workstation installs — typically appear on Fedora before they reach the more conservative Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases.

Release cycle

Fedora aims for two releases per year, conventionally around April and October. Each release is supported with package updates for roughly 13 months — long enough that there is always a one-version overlap during which you can take your time upgrading. There is no Fedora "LTS" release; the assumption is that you will upgrade through each major version.

The version-numbering scheme is simple: Fedora 39, 40, 41, and so on. Codenames were dropped in earlier days of the project.

Upgrades between Fedora versions are normally handled in place using dnf system-upgrade:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=<N>
sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot

where <N> is the target version. The reboot completes the upgrade.

Editions and spins

The project publishes several official editions, each targeted at a different use case:

In addition, the project produces a number of spins — community-maintained images that ship the same Fedora base with a different desktop or application stack. Notable spins include Fedora KDE Plasma, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt and the Fedora Astronomy and Design Suites.

Software model

Fedora uses the dnf package manager and the .rpm package format. Packages live in two main repositories:

• fedora — the base repository, frozen at release time.
• updates — updates and security fixes published during the release's support window.

By default Fedora ships only free software; third-party repositories such as RPM Fusion exist for non-free codecs, NVIDIA drivers and similar packages. Flatpak is enabled by default and Flathub is the conventional source for desktop applications. The flatpak command is available out of the box on Workstation.

Relationship to RHEL and CentOS Stream

Fedora sits at the top of Red Hat's distribution pipeline. The flow is:

Fedora → CentOS Stream → Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Fedora is where new technologies are tried out and where every package version starts. CentOS Stream is the continuously-updated preview of the next minor version of RHEL — a rolling-stable distribution that becomes the basis of the next RHEL point release. RHEL itself is a commercial, long-term-support product built from CentOS Stream snapshots; Red Hat backports security and bug fixes to RHEL for many years per major version.

For users, this means that running Fedora is a reasonable way to preview the technologies that will appear in future RHEL releases. CentOS Stream is closer to RHEL than Fedora is; community rebuilds such as Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL itself.

Following the project

• fedoraproject.org — the official site, including download links and release schedule.
• Fedora Discussion — the project's main forum.
• Fedora Docs — official documentation.
• Fedora Magazine — community articles, tutorials and release announcements.
• Fedora mailing lists — for in-depth project discussion.

Related reading on this site

• Comparing Linux distributions — where Fedora sits relative to Debian, Ubuntu and Arch.
• Linux security overview — reading Red Hat / Fedora security advisories.
• The Linux kernel — Fedora tracks recent mainline kernels closely.