Fedora 22 Live Security i686

Fedora (formerly Fedora Core) is an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora contains software distributed under a free and open source license and aims to be on the leading edge of such technologies.

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, uses Fedora on all of his computers.


Features

Fedora has a reputation for focusing on innovation, integrating new technologies early on and working closely with upstream Linux communities. Making changes upstream instead of specifically in Fedora ensures that the changes are available to all Linux distributions.

Fedora has a relatively short life cycle: version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2 is released and with approximately 6 months between versions, this means that a version of Fedora is supported for approximately 13 months. 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, which usually requires long-term vendor-support. Fedora users can upgrade from version to version using FedUp.

The default desktop in Fedora is the GNOME desktop environment and the default interface is the GNOME Shell. Other desktop environments, including KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE and Cinnamon, are available and can be installed.
Fedora 22 with KDE

Fedora uses the RPM package management system.

Security is also important in Fedora with one specific security feature being Security-Enhanced Linux, which implements a variety of security policies, including mandatory access controls, and which Fedora adopted early on.


Software

Fedora comes installed with a wide range of software such as LibreOffice and Firefox. Additional software is available from the software repositories and can be installed using the Yum or DNF package managers with graphical interfaces, such as GNOME Software, also being available. Additionally, extra repositories can be added to the system, so that software not available in Fedora can be installed. Third party repositories exist that distribute software not included in Fedora either because they don't meet Fedora's definition of free software or because their distribution may violate US law. One of the most popular third-party repositories is RPM Fusion. Fedora also provides users with an easy-to-use build system for creating their own repositories called Copr.


Spins

Similar to Debian blends, the Fedora Project also distributes custom variations of Fedora called Fedora spins or editions. These are built with specific sets of software packages, offering alternative desktop environments or targeting specific interests such as gaming, security, design, scientific computing (that includes SciPy, Octave, Kile, Xfig and Inkscape) and robotics. Fedora spins are developed by several Fedora special interest groups.


Architectures

Intel x86 and ARM are the primary architecture supported by Fedora. Pidora is specialized Fedora distribution for the Raspberry Pi. As of release 20, Fedora also supports PowerPC and s390 as secondary architectures.

from wikipedia