No. You can run Fedora out of the box on QEMU[1]. We have Fedora running on the Unleashed, but you can't buy those boards any more. SiFive have Fedora running on the Unmatched, which you can preorder now and will ship this quarter.
It comes out of the box with Linux in the eMMC and FPGA programming that connects the CPU cores to the peripherals, so if all you want to do is run RISC-V Linux then you don't need to muck about with FPGA programming. But you can, if you wish, rebuild the default FPGA programming from source code, enhance it, or replace it completely.
It's a good FPGA development environment (I have one too), but it's not a good RISC-V environment because of the slow clock speed - 650 MHz, which is about half the speed achievable on the HiFive Unleashed, itself not exactly a fast platform. If you want to play with FPGAs with lots of IO, or even experiment with writing your own peripherals for RISC-V then it's fun.
