Fedora (operating System)

Fedora (operating System)

Fedora ( /fɨˈdɒr.ə/), formerly Fedora Core, is an RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and owned by Red Hat. The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.

One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain software distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora developers prefer to make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux distributions.

A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2. This promotes leading-edge software because it frees developers from some backward compatibility restraints, but it also makes Fedora a poor choice for product development (e.g., embedded systems), which usually requires long-term vendor-support, unavailable with any version of Fedora.

In 2008, Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel, stated that he used Fedora because it had fairly good support for the PowerPC processor architecture, which he had favoured at the time.

According to DistroWatch, Fedora is the fourth most visited Linux-based operating system on their site as of January 2013, behind Mint, Mageia and Ubuntu, and it is the second most visited RPM-based Linux distribution.

Read more about Fedora (operating System):  History, Releases, Derivatives