Fedora

We can say that Fedora is the home version of Red Hat. Although we have marked this as a home version, Fedora ships in a server version and it's your choice as to how and where you use Fedora. The support for newer laptops and the latest hardware is going to be far greater. This then often makes it a target for home users and enthusiasts. The current version is Fedora 21 and uses almost all the very latest kernel with version 3.17.4-301.

The other advantage of using Fedora, even if not in a production format, is that you become familiar with technologies. These technologies will become enterprise-ready at some point. In this way, you will learn as the product is developed. For example, RHEL 7 is based around Fedora 19 and 20. If you have been an enthusiastic Fedora champion, you will already be familiar with GRUB2, BTRFS, docker, and systemd (all of which debut in RHEL 7).

Support for Fedora is community-driven with software updates available for about 13 months from the initial product launch. For example, Fedora 21 will be supported for 1 month after the release of Fedora 23. The release dates are about every 6 months, which gives us an approximate support life of 13 months. This is often why Fedora (and similar distributions to Fedora) do not make it to the enterprise category because of such a short update life cycle.

For learning and home use, this is truly a great distribution. You can choose to download the workstation, server, or cloud version at https://getfedora.org/.

From a popularity perspective, Fedora is certainly there. The numbers of hits to the Fedora download page over the past twelve months rates Fedora as being the fourth most popular distribution. To support this data and to take a look at where we read this from, you may visit http://www.distrowatch.com.