The Fedora Project is a community of people working together to build a free and open source software platform and to collaborate on and share user-focused solutions built on that platform. Or, in plain English, we make an operating system, and we make it easy for you to do useful stuff with it.
Actually, we produce several operating systems, or editions anyway.
The one that you're most likely interested in, and the one that we'll be focusing on, is **Fedora Workstation**.
Fedora Workstation has a wide range of software that's suitable for almost anyone.
You can use it for home use like browsing the Web, watching streaming video, editing photos, and playing games.
You can use it for work creating documents, crunching numbers in spreadsheets, or programming.
All of the software provided with Fedora is open source and free to download and use.
You can even modify it and distribute it yourself, if you want—but that's beyond the scope of this guide.
We're just going to focus on the new user experience and some "day two" stuff so you can acclimate to Fedora and start being productive right away.
== Who this document is for
This document is for folks new to Fedora Workstation, or who've been using it a while and would like to get a little more background and tips on how to make the most of Fedora Workstation.
We're focusing on desktop use and common tasks like web browsing, streaming media, editing photos or audio, and all kinds of productivity tasks that you may want to tackle with your desktop or laptop computer.
Typical daily computer usage, you might say.
== What's a Linux distribution?
Fedora Workstation is a Linux distribution, an operating system with the Linux kernel at its core plus the software you need to install it, manage it, and the applications that you want to use for daily work.
Fedora is one of many Linux distributions, and includes a lot of software you'll find in many Linux distributions.
For example, the GNOME desktop environment, and the [application]*Firefox* web browser, [application]*LibreOffice* office suite, and a lot of **GNU utilities** and so much more.
It is the highest level account on the system and is used for administration.
It gives the user full permission to modify files, and start and stop critical programs (called processes) on the system.
It is a security feature in Linux that limits normal user privileges only to those required for normal tasks.
For security reasons, the root account is disabled by default on Fedora Workstation.
Instead, the default user will be added to the group 'wheel'.
Members of this group are able to acquire root permissions using the 'sudo' command.
Whenever this user wants to make a system-wide change, such as stopping a fundamental program like the web server (httpd), the corresponding command is preceded by a sudo, e.g. `sudo systemctl stop httpd`.
The sudo then asks for the password of the user, not of root.
Benefits to using the command line include the ability to give multiple commands on one line, but it requires greater knowledge of Linux commands.
Documentation published on this site, as well as various tutorials and guides on the internet and elsewhere, often makes use of these terminal commands.
The office suite included by default in Fedora is [application]*LibreOffice*, a well-known and mature collection of software.
LibreOffice, includes a word processor ([application]*Write*), a spreadsheet program ([application]*Calc*), and presentation software ([application]*Impress*).
A simple image editing package ([application]*Draw*) and a relational database ([application]*Base*) are also available for optional installation.
