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.
Arch users may be shocked to find their distro of choice not mentioned in this page on new technology, and perhaps they have a point. But then so too might Gentoo or Linux from Scratch users, who also have access to the latest versions of everything, and can also compile it with whatever optimizations suit their CPU. We’ve focused instead on what distros offer out of the box, and with Arch, and more so with Gentoo, well, you barely get a box.
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?