Fedora 17
Fedora formerly Fedora Core, is an RPM-based, general
purpose collection of software, including anoperating system based on
the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora
Project and owned by Red Hat. The Fedora Project's mission is to lead
the advancement of free and open source software and content as a
collaborative community.
One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain software
distributed under a free and open source license, but also to be on the
leading edge of such technologies. Fedora developers prefer to
make upstream changes instead of applying fixes specifically for
Fedora—this ensures that their updates are available to all Linux
distributions.
A version of Fedora has a relatively short life cycle—the maintenance
period is only 13 months: there are 6 months between releases, and
version X is supported only until 1 month after version X+2. 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 (e.g., embedded systems), which usually
requires long-term vendor-support, unavailable with any version of
Fedora.
In 2008, Linus Torvalds, author of the Linux kernel, stated that he used
Fedora because it had fairly good support for thePowerPC processor
architecture, which he had favoured at the time.
According to DistroWatch, Fedora is the third most visited
Linux-based operating system on their site as of May 2012,
behind Mint and Ubuntu, and it is the most visited RPM-based Linux
distribution.
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