Fedora 23
Fedora has been around for a long time in one form or another. It was first released in 2003, under the name Fedora Core, although the Core part was later dropped (hardly anyone used it anyway). But it goes further back than that as Red Hat Linux (as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the commercial product).
With such a long pedigree, you would expect a mature and polished distribution (distro) and that is what you get. If you haven’t tried Fedora before, don’t get the idea that this is a staid commercial type distro, Fedora is used by Red Hat as a proving ground for new technologies, so it’s generally very bleeding edge, eg Fedora was the first distro to use Systemd and the next release may well be the first major distro to default to Wayland instead of X for the graphical desktop.
They were also the first major distro to use Gnome 3 although Fedora supports many different desktop choices and their massive installation DVD covers them all. This is a live version of the distro that includes only Fedora’s preferred desktop, Gnome 3. You can still install it from this DVD to get a Gnome Fedora system, there is an install icon in the Activities bar. Once you have Fedora running from your hard drive, you can install further desktops in the SoftwareManager if Gnome isn’t to your liking. Red Hat (and its derivatives such as CentOS) is one of the key distros in the corporate sector, and while Fedora is not the same, it is far more forward looking. It shares much with its commercial cousin, so this distro can not only be fun to use but may help you if you are looking for a career in Linux.
The boot process can appear to hang with some older graphics cards, we experienced it with an old Nvidia card. It looks like nothing is happening but the system is actually trying various options and will complete booting after a delay. The boot splash screen hides this activity, making it look like Fedora has hung or crashed, but if you press the Esc key, you can see that things are still happening. Once it gets past this delay, Fedora will boot as normal, and this only affects the live system, not an installed distro.