Summary
Fedora is the new free (as in beer) distribution which is sponsored by the folks at Red Hat. Formerly called simply "Red Hat Linux", Red Hat stopped providing this download as of version 9.2 sometime around April 2004. Red Hat felt it wasn't in their shareholders interest to support a freely available operating system and instead thought it would be better to focus on "Red Hat Enterprise".
Red Hat did not want to abandon the enterprise completely, so they started the Fedora Core linux product and allowed their employees to work on the project in their spare time.
Fedora Core focuses on a rapid release cycle with a rigid test and release schedule which provides two releases per year. In just two years, they are just about to release Fedora Core 4 and the product is keeping up with some of the best distributions out there.
Among some of the key features of Fedora Core are an easy-to-use graphical installer (Anaconda), your choice of the two major desktops (KDE and Gnome), a simplified software update agent (up2date), and a uniform desktop interfance (Blue Curve) that is consistant regardless of whether you choose KDE or Gnome.
Software Updates
Software updates in Fedora Core are mainly handled by the up2date agent which is a GUI client that manages the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) packages on the system. If you are running a graphical desktop and you are connected to the internet, the sytem will notify you when updates become available for your system.
Launching up2date will prompt you to enter the root password so up2date can fetch the list of updated packages and prompt you on which packages you want to install. After selecting the packages, the update will proceed and you will be notified of any problems. The entire process is rather painless, but I've noticed some problems when installing certain packages.
Another option, which a lot of people seem to prefer is to install YUM (which is the Yellowdog Update Manager.) This needs to be installed manullay by fetching the RPM package and certain other necessary packages. It provides a more reliable method for installing complex packages or multiple packages.
Support
One of the main beneftis of the Fedora distribution is that it has a large user base and therefore has many (if not all) popular software releases and new development is quickly incorporated in existing releases.
Since the release cycle is so rapid, the Fedora community only supports the releases for about a year (or until two new releases come out.) Not to worry though, a separate project group called Fedora Legacy will support older releases going forward.