In Choosing a distribution, I said that it’s not my intent to tell readers what distribution to use, and it still isn’t. But many of the characteristics I described might seem abstract, so they may not answer the question for everyone.

Many of the characteristics I described guided me toward Fedora, first as a user and later as a maintainer. I don’t have comments on all of them, but I’ll offer examples to illustrate how I evaluate those concerns in the context of Fedora.

  • Fedora includes promising new technology when it reaches adequate maturity, resulting in a highly technically capable system. Fedora often has new features and capabilities before any other distribution.

  • Fedora has a policy of staying close to upstream, and if I remember correctly, it was adopted shortly after another distro realized that one of the patches they’d been applying to openssl for years had drastically crippled key generation, resulting in a major security incident.

  • Fedora’s family spans the spectrum of stable release cadences. Fedora publishes a new stable release, every 6 months, with a 13 month support period. CentOS Stream publishes a stable release (based on Fedora) every 3 years, with a 5 year support period. Red Hat Enterprise Linux publishes a stable release (based on CentOS Stream) every 3 years, with a 10 year support period for each major release, and minor releases every 6 months, some of which have extended support periods of up to 4 years. No matter what your needs are, there’s probably a Fedora-derived release with an appropriate cadence.

  • Fedora’s build infrastructure is well managed, with distribution scripts and patches in Git, and builds managed by Koji. The build infrastructure is secured and private. Packages are not uploaded by maintainers.

  • Packages are directly signed, which is common for rpm-based distributions, but uncommon for other distributions which usually only sign metadata. Secure Boot is supported.

  • Fedora has extensive documentation for maintainers of individual packages, and for managing changes in the distribution. Changes are discussed in detail on the mailing list, and approved changes are communicated effectively to everyone who needs to coordinate work in order to make them successful and keep the distribution stable.

  • RHEL is common in a wide range of industries. CentOS Stream is being adopted by some of the world’s largest and most successful development organizations, including Meta. Fedora is being adopted by AWS as the basis of future releases of Amazon Linux. Fedora’s user and developer communities are a wealth of experience.

  • Fedora’s code of conduct encourages users to be respectful of one another, to be inclusive, and to be kind.

  • Fedora is maintained by thousands of contributors, with infrastructure provided by Red Hat. It is one of the most sustainable projects that I can think of.