Lifecycle and Maintenance of Fedora
In practice, Fedora releases a new version about every 6 months, which means than each version of Fedora gets updates for about 13 months. This allows users to "skip a release" while still being able to always have a system that is under maintenance. You can find information on the project releases at Fedora Release Schedule .
We say about 13 months because the supported period for released releases is dependent on the date the release under development goes final. As a result, Release X is supported until one month after the release of Release X+2.
This translates into:
- Fedora 39 will be maintained until 1 month after the release of Fedora 41.
- Fedora 40 will be maintained until 1 month after the release of Fedora 42.
Logic Behind Support Length
Fedora is focused on free and open source software innovations and moves quickly. If you want a distribution that moves slower but has a longer lifecycle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is derivative of Fedora or free rebuilds of that such as CentOS might be more suitable for you. Refer to the RHEL page for more details.
Historically, the Fedora Project has found supporting two releases plus a release under development to be manageable work load.