Red hat enterprise linux ��� fedora

What’s the difference between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

A Linux® distribution, or distro, is an installable operating system built from the Linux kernel, supporting user programs, and libraries. Each vendor or community’s version is a distro.

Because the Linux operating system is open sourced and released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), anyone can run, study, modify, and redistribute the source code, or even sell copies of their modified code. This differs greatly from traditional operating systems—Unix, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS—which are proprietary and far less modifiable.

How do I choose a Linux distro?

Choosing the right Linux distribution depends on your use case and tool requirements. Certain Linux distros work better for different purposes. Some distros are designed as desktop environments while others are designed to support backend IT systems (like enterprise or web servers).

When choosing your next Linux distro, your first consideration needs to be whether you need an enterprise Linux distro or a community Linux distro.

Enterprise vs. community Linux distros

Linux distributions are available as community versions or enterprise versions. A community distro is a free Linux distro primarily supported and maintained by the open source community. An enterprise—or commercial—Linux distro is available through a subscription from a vendor and does not rely solely on community support.

The primary difference between community and enterprise distros is who decides what’s important to users. A community distro’s direction is set by contributors, who choose and maintain packages from the wide variety of open source options. The direction of an enterprise distro is set by a vendor, based on the needs of their customers.

Think about it like this. The Fedora project is the upstream, community distro of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux. Red Hat is the project’s primary sponsor, but thousands of developers—unaffiliated with Red Hat—contribute to the Fedora project, making it the ideal testing ground for features that eventually get incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (after Red Hat puts those features through its own set of tests and quality assurance processes that are separate and distinct from those of Fedora).

What are the benefits of an enterprise distro?

If Linux is free and open source, why would you want to pay for a commercial distribution? Community distros are a great option for people who are new to Linux and don’t have much experience with the command line, or who just want to play around and experiment. If you’re trying to support a server for a long period of time, community distros like Fedora might not be the best choice.

Enterprise distros, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are designed to meet business needs and concerns. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers 10-year life cycle support (as opposed to Fedora’s 2 years of support), so you can better support long-term apps. With an enterprise distro, you get patches, updates, upgrades, expert technical support, and access to training and resources. A community distro relies on forum-based support from its community members, and release cycles aren’t always on a regular cadence.

Also with a commercially supported distro, you get the benefits of the latest open source innovation with the stability and support an enterprise needs. Red Hat has a team of engineers to help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your infrastructure performs and remains stable—no matter your use case and workload.

Popular Linux distros

• Android
• Arch Linux
• Centos
• Debian
• Elementary OS
• Fedora
• Gentoo Linux
• Kali Linux
• Linux Mint
• Manjaro Linux
• MX Linux
• Puppy Linux
• Slackware
• Solus
• Ubuntu and all its versions (Gnome, Kubuntu, Ubuntu mate, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu—just to name a few)
• Zorin OS

Why choose Red Hat for Linux?

Every technology in your IT stack needs to work together. And the workloads need to be portable and scalable across bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, or private and public clouds. They need a modern, security-focused operating system with long-term support. That operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

With a standard operating system underlying your workloads, you can easily move them across environments—wherever it makes sense for your business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you a consistent, stable foundation across hybrid cloud deployments, along with built-in manageability and integration with the broader Red Hat management and automation portfolio.

An innovative relationship

Developers and Linux enthusiasts flock to Fedora for the latest features and the opportunity to directly collaborate with Red Hat engineers. The Fedora community has thousands of users, contributors, and supporters, who interact through various online forums, email lists, and wikis to support each other. With a rapid development and release cycle, Fedora provides the latest technology on current hardware platforms.

The size and expertise of the Fedora open source community makes it the ideal testing ground for features that eventually get incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, after Red Hat puts those features through its own set of tests and quality assurance processes that are separate and distinct from those of Fedora.

Why Red Hat?

When enterprises choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they begin a relationship with the leading provider of open source solutions. Not only do we offer stable platforms with long support lifecycles, customers also get the benefits of a global engineering, consulting, and support organizations.

A Red Hat subscription gives you access to software and maintenance along with information and support services that span your entire application infrastructure lifecycle and architecture.

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Fedora Vs Red Hat: Which Linux Distro Should You Use and Why?

Last updated May 8, 2021 By Sarvottam Kumar 6 Comments

Fedora and Red Hat. Both Linux distributions belong to the same organization, both use RPM package manager and both provide desktop and server editions. Both Linux distributions have a greater impact on the operating system world.

This is why it is easier to get confused between the two similar distributions. In this article, I will discuss the similarities and difference between Red Hat and Fedora.

This will help you if you want to choose between the two or simply want to understand the concept of having two distributions from the same organization.

Difference Between Fedora And RHEL

Let’s talk about the difference between the two distributions first.

Community Version vs Enterprise Version

Back in 1995, Red Hat Linux had its first non-beta release, which was sold as a boxed product. It was also called Red Hat Commercial Linux.

Later in 2003, Red Hat turned Red Hat Linux into a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) focussed completely on enterprise customers. Since then, Red Hat is an enterprise version of Linux distribution.

What it means is that you have to subscribe and pay to use Red Hat as it is not available as a free OS. Even all software, bug fixes, and security support are available for only those who have an active Red Hat subscription.

At the time when Red Hat Linux became RHEL, it also resulted in the foundation of the Fedora Project that takes care of the development of Fedora Linux.

Unlike Red Hat, Fedora is a community version of the Linux distribution that is available at free of cost for everyone including bug fixes and other services.

Even though Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project, Fedora Linux is primarily maintained by an independent open source community.

Free vs Paid

Well, you will find the majority of Linux distributions are available to download free of cost. Fedora Linux is also one such distro, whose desktop, server, all other editions, and spins are freely available to download.

There are still Linux distros for which you have to pay. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one such popular Linux-based operating system that comes at cost of money.

You may get Red Hat for free by registering for its developer program. If you want the entire RHEL developer suite, it costs $99 per year. You have to pay more than $100 to purchase other RHEL versions for servers, virtual datacenters, and desktops. This comes with Red Hat customer support.

Upstream vs Downstream

Fedora is upstream of RHEL and RHEL is downstream of Fedora. This means when a new version of Fedora releases with new features and changes, Red Hat makes use of Fedora source code to include the desired features in its next release.

Of course, Red Hat also test the pulled code before merging into its own codebase for RHEL.

In another way, Fedora Linux acts as a testing ground for Red Hat to first check and then incorporate features into the RHEL system.

Release Cycle

For delivering the regular updates to all components of the OS, both RHEL and Fedora follow a standard fixed-point release model.

Fedora has a new version release approximately every six months (mostly in April and October) that comes with maintenance support for up to 13 months.

Red Hat releases a new point version of a particular series every year and a major version after approximately 5 years. Each major release of Red Hat goes through four lifecycle phases that range from 5 years of support to 10 years with Extended Life Phase using add-on subscriptions.

Cutting-edge Linux Distribution

When it comes to innovation and new technologies, Fedora takes a complete edge over the RHEL. Even though Fedora does not follow the rolling release model, it is the distribution known for offering bleeding-edge technology early on.

This is because Fedora regularly updates the packages to their latest version to provide an up-to-date OS after every six months.

If you know, GNOME 40 is the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment that arrived last month. And the latest stable version 34 of Fedora does include it, while the latest stable version 8.3 of RHEL still comes with GNOME 3.32.

File System

Do you put the organization and retrieval of data on your system at a high priority in choosing an operating system? If so, you should know about XFS and BTRFS file system before deciding between Red Hat and Fedora.

It was in 2014 when RHEL 7.0 replaced EXT4 with XFS as its default file system. Since then, Red Hat has an XFS 64-bit journaling file system in every version by default.

Though Fedora is upstream to Red Hat, Fedora continued with EXT4 until last year when Fedora 33 introduced Btrfs as the default file system.

Interestingly, Red Hat had included Btrfs as a “technology preview” at the initial release of RHEL 6. Later on, Red Hat dropped the plan to use Btrfs and hence removed it completely from RHEL 8 and future major release in 2019.

Variants Available

Compared to Fedora, Red Hat has very limited number of editions. It is mainly available for desktops, servers, academics, developers, virtual servers, and IBM Power Little Endian.

While Fedora along with official editions for desktop, server, and IoT, provides an immutable desktop Silverblue and a container-focused Fedora CoreOS.

Not just that, but Fedora also has purpose-specific custom variants called Fedora Labs. Each ISO packs a set of software packages for professionals, neuroscience, designers, gamers, musicians, students, and scientists.

Want different desktop environments in Fedora? you can also check for the official Fedora Spins that comes pre-configured with several desktop environments such as KDE, Xfce, LXQT, LXDE, Cinnamon, and i3 tiling window manager.

Fedora Cinnamon Spin

Furthermore, if you want to get your hands on new software before it lands in stable Fedora, Fedora Rawhide is yet another edition based on the rolling release model.

Similarities Between Fedora And RHEL

Besides the dissimilarities, both Fedora and Red Hat also have several things in common.

Parent Company

Red Hat Inc. is the common company that backs both Fedora project and RHEL in terms of both development and financial.

Even Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project financially, Fedora also has its own council that supervises the development without Red Hat intervention.

Open Source Product

Before you think that Red Hat charges money then how it can be an open-source product, I would suggest reading our article that breaks down everything about FOSS and Open Source.

Being an open source software does not mean you can get it freely, sometimes it can cost money. Red Hat is one of the open source companies that have built a business in it.

Both Fedora and Red Hat is an open source operating system. All the Fedora package sources are available here and already packaged software here.

However, in the case of Red Hat, the source code is also freely available for anyone. But unlike Fedora, you need to pay for using the runnable code or else you are free to build on your own.

What you pay to Red Hat subscription is actually for the system maintenance and technical support.

Desktop Environment And Init System

The flagship desktop edition of Fedora and Red Hat ships GNOME graphical interface. So, if you’re already familiar with GNOME, starting with any of the distributions won’t be of much trouble.

Are you one of the few people who hate SystemD init system? If so, then none of Fedora and Red Hat is an OS for you as both supports and uses SystemD by default.

Anyhow if you wishes to replace it with other init system like Runit or OpenRC, it’s not impossible but I would say it won’t be a best idea.

RPM-based Distribution

If you’re already well-versed with handling the rpm packages using YUM, RPM, or DNF command-line utility, kudos! you can count in both RPM-based distributions.

By default, Red Hat uses RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) for installing, updating, removing, and managing RPM software packages.

Fedora used YUM (Yellowdog Updater Modified) until Fedora 21 in 2015. Since Fedora 22, it now uses DNF (Dandified Yum) in place of YUM as the default package manager.

Fedora Or Red Hat: Which One Should You Choose?

Frankly, it really depends on who you’re and why do you want to use it. If you’re a beginner, developer, or a normal user who wants it for productivity or to learn about Linux, Fedora can be a good choice.

It will help you to set up the system easily, experiment, save money, and also become a part of the Fedora Project. Let me remind you that Linux creator Linus Torvalds uses Fedora Linux on his main workstation.

However, it definitely does not mean you should also use Fedora. If you happen to be an enterprise, you may rethink choosing it considering Fedora’s support lifecycle that reaches end of life in a year.

And if you’re not a fan of rapid changes in every new version, you may dislike cutting-edge Fedora for your server and business needs.

With enterprise version Red Hat, you get high stability, security, and quality of support from expert Red Hat engineers for your large enterprise.

So, are you willing to upgrade your server every year and get free community support or purchase a subscription to get more than 5 years of lifecycle and expert technical support? A decision is yours.

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