Does Fedora have cutting edge features, and what makes it so?
I saw another post recommend using Fedora if you want cutting edge features.
Is Fedora really a "cutting edge" distro?
I am not very familiar with Fedora, I know it's a community counterpart to RHEL and sometimes less tested new stuff goes into Fedora before going into RHEL, since they don't have to provide as much support for breakage in Fedora. Otherwise, given their packaging approach, I don't see why it would be any more "cutting edge" than say Debian Unstable or the "testing" releases of other distros.
For a distro like Arch, it is clear why you would expect cutting edge-ness:
- Packagers do minimal testing and adaptations of newly released software, so they can release new package versions very quickly
- There is also AUR which has an even more minimal process so new versions can come out even faster
- Rolling release means they don't get slowed down by backwards compatibility
- Arch's philosophy and culture strongly favors using the latest version of everything
Is there any special thing like this about Fedora that ensures cutting edge features? Or is it just cutting edge relative to RHEL? For example, is there something like "a lot of new Linux features are developed at Red Hat first so they appear in Fedora before other distros adopt them"? Or perhaps it is a matter of culture, where somehow Fedora maintainers/users have much more appetite for new stuff than other distros?
Fedora already has extensive documentation and active forums, and I'm sure the "long answer" is in there somewhere. I am looking for a shorter answer, no more than 3-5 paragraphs.
1 answer
The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| matthewsnyder | (no comment) | May 21, 2024 at 05:51 |
I think the Fedora project documentation covers this in the "First" section (emphasis mine):
First
We are committed to innovation.
We are not content to let others do all the heavy lifting on our behalf; we provide the latest in stable and robust, useful, and powerful free software in our Fedora distribution.
At any point in time, the latest Fedora platform shows the future direction of the operating system as it is experienced by everyone from the home desktop user to the enterprise business customer. Our rapid release cycle is a major enabling factor in our ability to innovate.
We recognize that there is also a place for long-term stability in the Linux ecosystem, and that there are a variety of community-oriented and business-oriented Linux distributions available to serve that need. However, the Fedora Project’s goal of advancing free software dictates that the Fedora Project itself pursue a strategy that preserves the forward momentum of our technical, collateral, and community-building progress. Fedora always aims to provide the future, first.
So being the first is indeed one of the stated objectives of the Fedora project.
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