Because Fedora is a great development platform -- and is used much more than you would think.

And it's backed by Red Hat -- which caters to the server market first and foremost. This seems a natural fit.

Fedora is a rolling distro so your packages are normally always very up to day unlike debian which can have long package freezes.

Fedora doesn't use the libre kernel like debian

Fedora is commonly the 'test bed' of things for red hat. Fedora is to Red Hat, what Sid is to Debian stable.

As opposed to...?

ARM Opteron development kits are targeted at server- notice the Opteron moniker- which means RedHat is a natural partner, and Fedora is RedHat's testing OS.

(Why not an old stable OS? Because ARM64 is brand-new)

I was thinking Red Hat, but I suppose that's not out yet for ARM64.

Red Hat tests new things in Fedora before they move into RHEL/CentOS. This makes Fedora a fantastic development platform as well as a "preview" of what may be coming in the future RHEL/CentOS releases.

It's been in the works for a long time, but was announced yesterday:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140730005126/en/Red-...

Plus, Fedora is exactly what you would want in a dev kit if you intend to target RHEL down the road.