Shiny and easy-to-use distributions are one thing, but which distros ship the latest Linux tech? Keep reading to find out

FEDORA IS RED HAT’S COMMUNITY DISTRO, where new technologies are honed before they make it into Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s (RHEL) business. Fedora was the first distribution to see systemd, PulseAudio and SELinux (the NSA-contributed access-control mechanism). Those titles might send shivers down the spines of some, but like them or not they’re here to stay. It’s historically been the best way to experience unadulterated Gnome 3. That desktop offers the best Wayland experience, and Fedora was the first to offer Wayland by default (still with the shuddering?). So it’s nothing if not a trailblazer distro.

The latest Fedora 32 even enables Firefox’s new Wayland backend. And if you’re feeling adventurous, enable Webrender and VA-API acceleration (which you can read more about on Martin Stransky’s blog at https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-va-api-on-wayland). Indeed VA-API acceleration, which appeared in Chromium, debuted in Fedora’s build over a year ago. So if Fedora receives new features, smoother browsers, why on Earth aren’t you using it?

Occasionally Fedora is sidestepped because of its philosophy on software freedom. If you want proprietary software (including the Nvidia driver), or patent-encumbered multimedia codecs, these have to be added through a third-party repo such as RPMFusion or Negativo 17. The codecs issue is much less of a big deal nowadays. Popular streaming sites all use open formats (or at least, in the case of h.264, ones where an open source codec is available), and MP3 became a patent-free format in 2017. A free AAC codec was made available shortly after, so you can play all your ripped CDs from yesteryear out of the box. Or you could rip them again in a lossless, free format such as FLAC.