The Linux operating system is a forerunner of the open-source technologies that we use today. Fedora is one of the top bleeding-edge distributions backed by Red-hat and the Fedora community. The community share some common values or the Four Foundations: Freedom, Features, Friends, and First.
These values make Fedora a cutting-edge distro which I favor for development due to its consistent OS experience, support for emerging technologies, and extensive support from Fedora Friends.
Fedora desktop
Reasons why developers choose Fedora
The following article will outline five reasons why developers and engineers alike choose Fedora for development.
Fedora is available in different editions like Fedora Workstation, Server, IoT, CoreOS, and Silverblue. In addition, fedora gets a new release every six months, with security updates and support with each release. While not the only choice, Fedora prides itself in freedom as an open-source platform for hardware, cloud solutions, and containers that enables developers to build tailored solutions for their users.
Fedora workstation is an easy-to-install operating system with a complete set of tools for developers and users of all kinds. On the other hand, Fedora Server is a powerful OS with the latest data center technologies that control all your infrastructure and services.
Emerging technologies
Fedora is the preferred operating system for a host of emerging technologies like containers, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning. Deep Learning has undergone a lot of growth with extensive investments from Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft, building dedicated tools and infrastructures. Fedora has extensive libraries, tutorials, examples, and no other OS offers the same level of support for the most recent versions of free open source platforms and software. That’s why it is the operating system of choice for many of the most popular frameworks, including OpenCV, TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Keras.
Building production-ready stacks can be a complex task that often proves a barrier to the adoption of machine learning – but developers can avoid this barrier by using technologies like Kubeflow, OpenCV, and PyTorch with Fedora Workstation. Developers are discovering countless applications for Deep Learning across and managing containers in almost every industry. Fedora is providing the foundation for these projects with an emerging operating system dedicated to containerization and IoT.
For example, some emerging operating systems include Fedora CoreOS. It is an automatically updating, minimal operating system for running containerized workloads securely at scale. It provides a secure platform to manage containerized applications with technologies like Docker compose, Podman, or Kubernetes. Another project I have been keen to work with is Fedora Silverblue, an immutable desktop operating system that aims at providing good support for container-focused workflows.
Similarly, developers building IoT solutions can develop their software quickly and easily with their preferred tools on Fedora Workstation or build and seamlessly deploy to IoT hardware running Fedora IoT. Fedora IoT is an immutable OS that has been build with a focus on security and is a foundation for IoT and device edge ecosystems. Moreover, it has multiple architecture support like x86_64, ARM® aarch64, and other processors in the same way across all architectures. It makes it easy for developers to build, deploy, and manage containerized applications with built-in Open Container Initiative (OCI) image support using podman or other popular public registries.
Using Fedora helps users significantly boost developer productivity. Developers do not need to account for differences between operating systems or lose valuable time resolving issues caused by software variation. These factors accelerate innovation velocity and enable developers to get applications to market and production environments far more quickly and seamlessly.
Consistent OS experience
The Fedora Project is an upstream community distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the project’s primary, with many developers and engineers who contribute, making it ideal for testing new features that eventually get incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To further enhance stability, it also puts new features through a set of tests and quality assurance.
Fedora has a 2-year life cycle support that offers better supports for tools and applications. With each Fedora release, you get technical support, patches, updates, upgrades, and access to extensive documentation and resources. As a community distro, it relies on forum-based support from its team members, who set the direction of the OS, chooses and maintains a wide range of packages and open-source tools.
The innovative and direct collaborative relationship between Fedora Friends and Red Hat engineers ensures consistent, rapid development and release cycles that provide the latest technology on current hardware platforms. The consistency of Fedora is heavily contributed by the team of Red Hat engineers who help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure both Red Hat and Fedora infrastructure perform and remain stable in any use case and workload.
A bleeding-edge distro
The bleeding edge nature of the Fedora distro relates to its up-to-date nature that offers new, experimental, more extreme technologies on the cutting or leading edge. Fedora is always on the rollout for the latest open-source features, driver updates, and software. It often makes radical architecture updates that create enthusiasm in the Linux community because they’re so remarkably progressive. For example, Fedora’s adoption of GNOME 40 and making btrfs its default file system has received extensive enthusiasm and is still widely discussed in Linux forums. The up-to-date nature ensures that when any new open-source technology gets released, it will quickly find its way to Fedora’s package manager. It gives developers a platform to test and experience the software.
For example, the newest release Fedora 34, is pre-packaged with Linux Kernel 5.11, a stable kernel offering stability to the operability of the Linux OS. Another major up-to-date instance of Fedora is Systemd. Among major distros, Fedora was the first to implement and use the systemd daemon as its default init system. Systemd hosts an array of system components like scheduling and managing system tasks and jobs. Fedora was also the first to use Wayland as a display server protocol that enables direct communication between the composer and clients.
In the Fedora project, Rawhide is the cutting-edge version. It provides a platform for testing new software, fixing bugs, and getting an early look at the latest code. Packages receive consistent updates, with new versions of programs rolling out very quickly. Moreover, this does not in any way mean that Rawhide is unusable. On the contrary, the Fedora community provides stable software versions where all of the code comes from upstream developers and is suitable for everyday use.
This progressive mindset among Fedora’s developers ensures that users will always receive the latest apps before other distributions. Developers who want to test and experience the newest versions of software packages like visual software, desktop environments, and file managers usually flock to Fedora for the updated packages in their repositories since other relatively progressive distributions tend to wait on them. Often, users do not anticipate running into random OS bugs or glitches because the next release of system updates and features will come with a recommended patch raised in its bug tracker. These reasons give Fedora developers the needed confidence to use the OS to innovate and bring new software into production environments.
Hardware and software freedom
One core value of Fedora is freedom which guides Fedora Friends and engineers at Red Hat in designing and creating a Linux ecosystem dedicated to free software and content. As a result, the team has put together the best possible Linux desktop distro with unparalleled hardware support across the board.
The team regularly test and certify the device stack, focusing on audio, Bluetooth, input devices, network, power management, display adapters, storage devices, and much more. In essence, Fedora users have the freedom to upgrade their hardware by adding additional memory, GPU cards, and storage without any limits imposed by the operating system. Thus, it makes it an ideal choice for developers with specific or diverse hardware requirements or diverse infrastructures to implement and manage software.
By concentrating on free software and content, the Fedora project ensures that developers have access to an extensive library of software development tools that are up to date. Due to Fedora’s regular release philosophy, libraries are always up to date, so developers do not have to go out of their way to find the latest tools they need to stay at the forefront of their development needs. For example, the latest release Fedora 34, pre-loads all necessary development packages such as Binutils 2.35, Glibc 2.33, Golang 1.16, Python 3, Gcc 11, Ruby 3.0, MariaDB 10.5, Ruby on Rails 6.1, and many more.
Developers can utilize numerous programming language compilers, integrated development environments (IDEs), toolchains, and architectures like ARM aarch64, X86_64, and other specialized environments. Such a level of software support is essential for a seamless development process. In essence, developers do not have to spend a lot of time fixing compatibility issues before any development process of applications. Fedora’s flexibility will accelerate development, reduce friction and eliminate issues that might otherwise arise when selecting appropriate tools and components for your development architecture.
Extensive support from the Fedora community
Fedora enjoys extensive global support from a community of contributors like volunteers and Red Hat engineers, who work as a team to advance the Four Foundations of Fedora: Freedom, Features, Friends, and First. The team includes software engineers, designers and artists, web designers, writers, system administrators, speakers, and many more. Everyone can join the team no matter their skills and will always have a place in the community of Fedora Friends.
The team at Fedora has created an environment for constructive contribution to effectively compare, adopt different ideas to find the best solutions for advancement, and help Fedora developers and users who are getting started.
Getting help with Fedora is easy. Fedora boasts a large developer ecosystem with numerous forums handling everything from technical and software development discussions to helping new users feel right at home. Whatever the subject, Fedora’s friends are welcoming and knowledgeable.
The list below is a good starting place to find the best Fedora support from the wider community.
- Fedora wiki
- Fedora docs
- Fedora magazine with extensive tutorials
- IRC channels
Wrapping up
The article has highlighted some key reasons why developers gain significant advantages from using Fedora Workstation. The key benefits include the following:
- Fedora is a pioneer in creating a platform for the latest cutting-edge technologies and tools in IoT, containerization, and AI.
- Fedora is a consistent operating system where developers can use an extensive list of software packages on development and target production environments.
- Fedora offers freedom in both hardware and software support.
- The extensive Fedora community “Fedora Friends” is always willing to help educate, troubleshoot, and discuss ideas.
- Fedora enjoys enterprise-level support from Red Hat.
- Fedora always seeks to provide the future first.
Fedora is my choice for all development needs and architectures. It is reliable, secure with overwhelming support, making it the best platform for development and production environments.
