Fedora began in 2003, when Red Hat split its product line into the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a community distribution, Fedora Core, which merged with the volunteer Fedora Linux project. It is the upstream for CentOS Stream and RHEL. Features usually land in Fedora first and reach enterprise users a few years later.
Fedora has often been the first big distribution to adopt new technology: systemd, GNOME 3, Wayland, PipeWire, Btrfs by default and DNF5. Releases arrive about every six months, and each is supported until one month after the release two versions later, about 13 months in all. Upgrading between releases with dnf system-upgrade is routine.