Is Fedora an upstream testing platform for RHEL?

rjo0

I thought RHEL is upstream of Fedora, how can Fedora be an upstream testing platform then? Its also inconsistent with the visualization of the other distributions and families, as SLES is supposed to be upstream for openSUSE, which also makes more sense with the visualization.

KevinCSmallwood

Fedora is upstream from RHEL. OpenSuse is upstream from SLES. When we talk about being upstream, we are referring to software features and development. Red Hat uses Fedora to try new features before they get put into a future release of RHEL. The same applies to OpenSUSE and SLES. Certain features in a Fedora release may or may not be found in a future RHEL release. Fedora is considered a "bleeding edge" release for RHEL. Unless you know what you are doing, we don't recommend people new to Linux run Fedora. Sometimes Fedore may be unstable--an environment you probably should not be learning Linux with. OpenSuse is not typically as experimental as Fedora is, but new features will find their way into OpenSuse that may or may not find their way into SLES. Note that these new features may also come and go from these upstream releases. This is what we mean by "upstream."

The diagram at the beginning of your note is showing how various Linux distributions (Distros) are related. Fedora and CentOS, for example, are Red Hat distributions; software packages are of the "rpm" format. Ubuntu and Mint are Debian distributions. Sorry that this was confusing but thank you for asking about this so we could clarify.