Since I have already used several distributions (in the past mainly Debian as a learning distribution, more recently Arch Linux), I am interested in how Fedora differs from other Linux distributions. The way I see it: Behind the development of Fedora is a large company, Red Hat (once upon a time, the first distribution I encountered was Red Hat at my workplace at the time, it ran on a gateway machine). It uses its own well-established package manager. Other than that, what other differences are there?
Fedora is a GNU-esque distribution of Linux, that in and of itself would make it different from the Major Linux Distros.
2 posts were split to a new topic: Amarok on F40 seems deprecated?
Fedora is often the first distribution to make major changes and adopt new technology that will take several years to land by default in other distributions like Ubuntu or openSUSE. Recently, Fedora’s KDE edition dropped X11 and Workstation won’t include X11 by default in the next release. No other distribution has even gone as far as deprecating X11 (save for Fedora Asahi), but they will follow Fedora’s lead a few years later.
Fedora uses SELinux rather than AppArmor. Fedora uses firewall-cmd rather than iptables or ufw (well, you could use any of them).
Fedora has their own Flatpak remote and are investigating packaging more of their packages as Flatpaks. This allows them to sandbox their own distribution-maintained packages and allow the same version to be installed on all currently-supported versions of Fedora.
Fedora limits their downstream changes; GNOME is mostly untouched. If they want to add a feature to GNOME, they get it added upstream. This is similar to Arch and openSUSE, but not Ubuntu.
Fedora’s Atomic Desktops are intended to be Fedora’s flagship distributions in the future. Ubuntu is doing something similar but with Snaps instead of Flatpaks. openSUSE’s Aeon project is similar, but I don’t think they intend it to be the default.
I see it as something similar to Arch, but with batteries included.
4 Likes
Hard to follow this because it’s so good and says pretty much everything i would. But to me, the “fit it on a t-shirt” version is: Fedora, being “semi-rolling”, is the sweet spot between the stable releases like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint and the rolling ones like OpenSUSE/Arch. It takes the best of both models and throws in a willingness to innovate, like being the first to become Wayland only. It also hits all levels: immutable distros, semi-rolling, and bleeding edge (rawhide), and does this for multiple DE’s. Something for everybody.
3 Likes
Fedora Atomic desktop is really an innovative initiative. Is it also available for ARM?
Indeed, Fedora is perhaps the golden mean between the stable Debian and the rolling Arch, and it can also be innovative.
1 Like
SELinux, I’m not aware of any other non-RH-related distro that use it
If it is not Selinux, there is Apparmor as a security kernel module in Linux distributions. The fact is that I have not seen SElinux used anywhere other than Red Hat based distributions.
Fedora is not a rolling release so major updates are point releases but it updates daily keeping it more up to date then other point releases. Fedora also does not offer LTS. Fedora also has large enterprise backing. I would recommend Fedora for developers, gamers, or hobbyists who want the latest up to date software without dealing with the hassle of arch and the security of being related to a large enterprise project. OpenSUSE tumbleweed offers similar benefits to Fedora but I have found fedora to be faster and less unstable then OpenSUSE tumbleweed (granted it may have been hardwware issues on my end).
I would not recommend Fedora to non tech savy people, people who require 100% stability over anything else, or people who are looking for LTS on point releases (Fedora only offers 2 years of support for each point release and upgrading more then 2 versions higher can get difficult).
1 Like
There is a lot of truth in what you write. By the way, I also run openSUSE Tumbleweed, and I think it’s at least as stable as Fedora.