Fedora Workstation

Red Hat's community distribution and the reference GNOME desktop -- fast-moving, close to upstream, and the proving ground for features that later land in RHEL.

Beginner-Friendly Desktopdesktopdeveloper-focusedGNOMERPMRed-Hat-sponsoredDownload ↗Official site ↗Docs / Wiki ↗

Based on

Independent (RPM/Red Hat lineage)

First released

2003

Package manager

DNF (.rpm)

Desktop environments

GNOME

Fedora Workstation ships the newest GNOME release almost the moment it's tagged upstream, with a roughly six-month release cycle and about 13 months of support per version, making it the go-to choice for developers who want current software without going fully rolling-release. Because Red Hat funds and steers Fedora as the upstream testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, features like Wayland-by-default, PipeWire audio, and Btrfs-by-default all landed in Fedora years before enterprise distributions. It ships with a stricter free-software/legal stance than Ubuntu -- no proprietary codecs or NVIDIA drivers preinstalled, requiring RPM Fusion as a well-known third-party add-on repo. Alongside the GNOME-based Workstation edition, official 'Spins' offer the exact same base with KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other desktops instead.

MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.