Operating Systems
Fedora
An upstream-first Linux distribution sponsored by Red Hat, with a fast release cycle and modern packages, security-hardened by default.
Fedora is community-driven but sponsored by Red Hat, and it’s often where new features and packages show up first in the Linux world before they eventually make their way into other, slower-moving distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux among them).
A few things worth knowing:
- Current software. Fedora ships new package versions relatively quickly, with a new major release roughly every six months. You get more up-to-date software than a stability-focused distribution, at the cost of somewhat more frequent changes.
- SELinux enabled by default. Fedora ships with SELinux — a mandatory access control system that restricts what a process can do even if it’s compromised — turned on out of the box, not left as an optional extra to configure. That’s a real, concrete security default most distributions don’t ship with.
- Upstream-first philosophy. Fedora tends to work closely with the original developers of the software it packages, rather than carrying a lot of distribution-specific patches.
A reasonable pick if you want a modern, actively-developed system with a real security-hardening default already switched on.