Fedora will remain my daily-driver desktop distro for the foreseeable future. It’s the best just works distro for daily life, work and play. I would recommend it to new and seasoned Linux users alike. Because even if you are a good system administrator, who has time for all that faffing about on your desktop when you’re just trying to get some work done? That being said, there are a few things I would recommend you do immediately after installation to make your experience with this great operating system perfect.

Disclaimer: you should never copy/paste commands from some random website. I am not trying to deliberately screw up anyone’s system but when executing commands that you don’t understand there is always the possibility of accidentally borking your system. I promise that to the best of my knowledge, these commands will not bork your system. At the same time, why trust me? I recommend familiarizing yourself with The Linux Command Line before running any commands you find on the web.

With that said, let’s get started!

Improve DNF configuration⌗

By default, Fedora’s DNF package manager only downloads one package at a time. Most people these days have access to bandwidth that can handle much more. So you should configure DNF to download several packages at a time in parallel. DNF also defaults to no any time you are asked for confirmation. Change the default to yes so you can just hit enter twice to run your update or install new packages.

Enter this command: sudo vi /etc/dnf/dnf.conf, replace vi with your preferred text editor, and add these lines to the end of the file:

# Speed enhancements:
fastestmirror=True
max_parallel_downloads=4 # or more depending on your internet connection.
defaultyes=True
keepcache=True

If you’re interested in seeing what other DNF settings you can change, check out the DNF Configuration Reference.

Update the system⌗

This tip is pretty short. Now that you’ve got a faster DNF, run a system update to make sure you have all the latest and greatest packages.

sudo dnf update

Enable RPM Fusion⌗

RPM Fusion is a repository that provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship for whatever reason. You can choose between Free and Nonfree repositories or both. Here we will do both to give us access to the largest amount of software.

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf groupupdate core

RPM Fusion is now enabled and you should be able to access this repository from GNOME Software.

Check out RPM Fusion Configuration for more details.

Add Flatpaks⌗

Since Flatpaks are a universal package format designed by RedHat, of course Fedora is able to use Flatpaks out of the box. But by default, you are restricted to Fedora’s Flatpak repo. The Fedora project is more committed to Free and Open Source software than some other distributions. That is why these extra repositories are not pre-configured. In case you need some software that is proprietary or otherwise not in the standard Flatpak repository, you can add the flathub.org repository. This will give you access to practically all the Flatpaks available online.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

For more information, check out flatpak.org.

Change Your Hostname⌗

Most distributions ask you to give your computer a hostname at installation time. Fedora doesn’t for some reason. Not a big deal, but if you want to change the hostname, here’s how.

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname "new_hostname_here"

Install Media Codecs⌗

Here again we find packages that are not included in the default Fedora installation for reasons that are beyond me. They’re not even proprietary. These codecs are a must-have if you plan on watching any videos online at Odysee, YouTube or similar sites. Run these commands to get 21st century audio-video codecs.

sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
sudo dnf groupupdate sound-and-video

That’s All!⌗

With this handful of commands, your installation of Fedora should not be capable of everything you need. As you may have noticed, most of it is just gaining access to some extra software repositories and codecs not installed by default because they may not contain 100% Free software. While this is an inconvenience to some, I don’t think it’s a big deal. I appreciate the Fedora Project’s commitment to Free software. Even a new user should be able to handle copy/pasting these commands to make their Fedora more useful.