Fedora is a Linux distribution developed by the community-supported Fedora Project which is sponsored primarily by Red Hat
Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of free technologies.
Fedora is the upstream source of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution.
Fedora integrates new technologies early on and working closely with upstream Linux communities.
Making changes upstream instead of specifically for Fedora ensures that the changes are available to all Linux distributions.
Each version is usually supported for at least 13 months, where version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2 is released and with approximately 6 months between most versions.
Fedora users can upgrade from version to version without reinstalling.
Fedora comes preinstalled with a wide range of software such as LibreOffice and Firefox.
Additional software is available from the software repositories. Extra repositories can be added to the system, so that software not available in Fedora can be installed easily.
Software that is not available via official Fedora repositories can be installed using third-party repositories.
Popular third-party repositories include RPM Fusion free and non-free repositories.
Fedora also provides users with an easy-to-use build system for creating their own repositories.
Fedora implements a variety of security policies, including mandatory access controls, which Fedora adopted early on.
Fedora provides a hardening wrapper, and does hardening for all of its packages by using compiler features such as position-independent executable (PIE).