Fedora Workstation

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.