Introduction

The Fedora Project is a community of people working together to build a free and open source operating system.
We value Freedom, Friends, Features and First. You will find that we are a respectful and inclusive community. We don’t only build an operating system, we build a community that helps make computing accessible to everybody. Our development defaults to 'open' - you could come and see us at work if you wanted. Find more details on the project on What is Fedora.

The Fedora Project is sponsored by Red Hat, which is owned by IBM.

The working language of the Fedora Project is English, however, Fedora is localized in many other languages; you can select your preferred language during installation and it can be changed at any time later. You can also join the Fedora Localization Team to ensure your language is included and up to date. You could even translate this guide!

GNU/Linux (we’ll call it Linux) is an Operating System. You need an Operating System to run all the other software you need to be productive or to play games. Being Open Source, Linux is free to download, to use and to update.

Open Source software is developed and maintained by both individual users and by large companies. Open Source is shared amongst users, inventors and sponsors. It powers home computers and large enterprise systems.

You should use Fedora Linux if your current Operating System can’t be upgraded, if you don’t want to pay for expensive hardware or if you value control and sovereignty over your own computing environment and data. In many cases it runs significantly faster than other operating systems on the same hardware.

In this guide we will give you the instructions to install one version of Linux — Fedora Linux — with KDE Plasma Desktop. For the software you need, we will use the Mozilla suite for email and web-browsing, and LibreOffice for word-processing and spreadsheets.
Most of the software we will use is available in the official Fedora software repositories.

Fedora Linux makes operating systems for:

There are also different Desktop Environments (DEs for short) you could use with Fedora. These include Gnome and KDE which are the main DEs in Fedora Workstation and Fedora KDE Plasma Editions respectively. They are well-maintained and supported.

We’ll focus on Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. Plasma Desktop is packaged by and available from Fedora, but is made by KDE (KDE Plasma).

We have chosen to focus on KDE Plasma as it will look familiar to most people who’ve used a computer before. Plasma is easy to use, up-to-date and has a large community to help support you.