Technology

If you are going to play games you might as well go and try Bazzite instead! It's built on a Fedora base with some good additions:

• It's atomic: this basically means that everytime yov boot your computer you'll have the choice of booting onto the newest version of your system, or the one before. If you fuck up anything it's as easy as reverting to the last version where things were alright!

• It comes with a bunch of preloaded drivers and compatibility layers: makes compatibility with modern games and software as good as you can get it without having to tinker heaps. It's pretty seamless.

• The installer includes many programs by default. Just tick a few boxes and you can choose to have Spotify, OBS, Discord or Darktable automatically installed in your computer

As for the documented support you can probably go a long way with the Arch, Gentoo and Fedora wikis. Other than that I'm afraid it's gonna be relying on forums and Reddit. I've never irreversably broken my Fedora system for what is worth, and I don't consider myself that tech savvy!

Game support is also really good these days. Anything that you can play via Steam will basically run. And performance is better for some games on Linux these days! Itch.io also has good support I think. You should be able to run most things that don't use shady anti-cheat, but forget about League of Legends, Valorant or Fortnite.

I'm not sure what you mean by Linux version! But Fedora (and Bazzite) belong to their own "branch" of Linux, apart from Debian and Arch. Their philosophy is a balance between rock-solid stability (Debian) vs bleeding-edge software (Arch) that many people, including me, think hits the sweet spot quite well!

If there's anything I missed or you are curious feel free to ask more questions :)

What version of Linux does Fedora install?

Whatever resides in its repositories for the specific release of Fedora. What exactly do you need the specific version for? I'm sorry, but this question sounds as if you were trying to imitate some kind of savvyness.

Is it directly compatible with Windows software such as games and OBS,

Linux doesn't present Windows NT ABI, if that is your question. It's a different operating system, and it would be a very weird expectation of it to do that.

or does it require modifications/compatibility installations such as WINE?

Wine is a userland implementation of Windows subsystem for NT, only for Unix-likes.

So yes, if you want to run Windows applications, you are going to use Wine.

Does it have documented support online or is it a matter of haunting forums and such for when problems occur?

Good documentation is present, unlike with Windows. Haunting forums is generally not our way of doing things. However, that will yield better results than Windows, too.

And no matter how solid an OS is, I will tend to break it, generally by doing stupid shit, but I will break it. Before putting it back together. Which is generally how I tend to learn software.

I'm not sure you're an adult. I'm also not sure you've written a single line of code in your life.

What version of Linux does Fedora install?

As of this writing, My install of Fedora Linux 40 KDE is running Linux kernel version 6.10.11.

If that's not what you were asking, Fedora is the distro. It's a fork of Red Hat, uses the rpm package format, they offer the GNOME desktop by default (the "Workstation" flavor) but several other popular UIs are available.

Is it directly compatible with Windows software such as games and OBS, or does it require modifications/compatibility installations such as WINE?

Linux is not directly compatible with Windows software. Either the developer/publisher of the software must ship a Linux version or a compatibility layer such as WINE muse be used. If you play games on Steam, Steam will pretty much just handle that. There is a setting in Steam's settings called Enable Steam Play for all other titles which at this point is the "just work" button.

OBS is open source and widely available on Linux. I just now installed it from Fedora's package manager.

Does it have documented support online or is it a matter of haunting forums and such for when problems occur?

It's documented and supported a hell of a lot better than Windows is. I don't know how people use that puddle of shit. I was converting a computer from an HDD + Dell Optane to a regular SSD. Apparently I didn't quite have the BIOS set up right for this so it gave me an "Install error 0xd2c77e2939a44aa7b5" Which I guess you're expected to write down on a piece of paper by hand because the Windows installer runs in an incomplete and useless environment. Trying to install Linux on this same machine, I got an error which said "Such and such BIOS setting is probably wrong. You can read more abut it here" and gave a hyperlink to a wiki, which was clickable because this was running in the full desktop LIVE environment, and it also included a QR code link to the same article so you could easily pull it up on a mobile device.

That said a lot of your "hey I'm having this weird issue" is going to take you to the distro's forums or to Reddit. As if that's not where most Windows tech support comes from anyway, Microsoft doesn't answer any questions.

And no matter how solid an OS is, I will tend to break it, generally by doing stupid shit, but I will break it. Before putting it back together. Which is generally how I tend to learn software.

You'll fit right in here. I once borked a Linux Mint install by uninstalling Python. A LOT of shit broke including the package manager, I couldn't get Python reinstalled. That was a reinstall of the OS, thankfully I had /home on a separate partition so I could just install the OS around it without touching that and I didn't even have to restore a backup. That kind of mistake tends not to be the "I just ruined my life" moment that borking Windows is because Linux is faster and easier to install. I've never killed a Linux install doing anything "normal" aka what you'd expect to do if you were used to Windows. All except once I was doing goofy things with the system files, and that once I was building a circuit on a Raspberry Pi while it was running, a jumper wire got away from me and touched something on the board and it froze. Had to power cycle it. Probably don't let random wires touch your motherboard while the computer is running. That's a Top Gear Top Tip.