What Is Fedora Linux Good For?

Fedora won "Most Memorable Booth" at the So Cal Linux Expo 20x.  I've had multiple people ask me why and if we had some kind of gimmick.  To be fair, we did have excellent swag this year and a great crew of people at the booth, but in my opinion, it was our enthusiastic community of users who made it truly exceptional.

Most Memorable Booth award

This year, instead of asking overly generic questions like "Do you use Fedora?" and "Have you tried Kinoite or Silverblue yet?", I decided to ask "What's something fun or interesting you're doing with Fedora these days?" and the answers very much did not disappoint.

Fedora running on a Microsoft Surface Go tablet

Workstation Adventures

When I asked the person above what they were using Fedora for, they pulled out this Surface Go tablet running on Fedora 37!  It honestly looked amazing!

Gaming was another common use reported for Fedora.  The fact that Steam OS, Proton, and Lutris (who was at the event) have all contributed to the Linux gaming ecosystem has all meant very good things for Fedora as a gaming platform. 

At least one user reported that they are running Fedora on a Lenovo laptop that came with Fedora pre-installed!

At Work

Multiple people advised that they use Fedora to teach others Linux, with one of them saying that they used Fedora in the classroom for this purpose.  Another user said that Fedora is running on their microcontrollers at work.

At Home

Fedora IoT and CoreOS really shined here, especially around Home Lab and Home Automation use cases. 

For Home Automatiom, one user reported that they are running a 5-node Spark cluster with Fedora IoT on Raspberry Pis.  Another made their own digital photo frame powered by Fedora.

For Home Lab users, someone reported using Fedora as a router and DHCP server for their home networking.  Another was using Fedora CoreOS for experimental network testing and for running their own Nextcloud instance.  Another is running a k3s cluster on Fedora to run their own FreeIPA with Fedora Server. 

For Development

If you thought I was adventurous for using Fedora to write a BASIC shell for Linux, one user shared that he was using Fedora to write his own DNS server from scratch in Rust!  Another is using Fedora to write Android apps and test them in VMs.  Another is writing BPF programs focused on securing IoT devices.  And, finally, a user said that they used Fedora to package their own software for the Fedora repos and said he really enjoyed the overal experience of getting it packaged in RPM and the review process.

Conclusion

So what is Fedora good for?  It's hard to find something Fedora isn't good for these days!

Current rating: 5