Things to do on a Fresh Fedora 34/35 Desktop Install

In this guide, we are going to check on a number of things that are recommended on a new Fedora 34/35 workstation install.

Fedora is a free and open source Linux distribution developed by the community-supported Fedora Project which is sponsored primarily by Red Hat. Fedora 35 is the latest in the series.

Fedora works mainly as an upstream distribution for Centos 8 Steam and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This means that with Fedora comes the latest Linux Kernel and packages with cutting edge features and applications.

The Fedora desktop Edition comes in many other flavours, check this page on Fedora Spins here. Here is a list of some of them:

KDE Plasma Desktop
XFCE Desktop
LXQT Desktop
Mate – Compiz Desktop
Cinnamon Desktop
LXDE Desktop
Soas Desktop
i3 Tiling Windows Manager

Update the system

When you install Fedora 34 from an ISO, the packages are always going to be out of date since there are a lot of updates and bug fixes that have been added since the ISO was built. It is always recommended to ensure that all packages are updated before the system is used. Please use this command to update all packages in Fedora:

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sudo dnf update -y

Change the hostname

Once the system has been updated, it’s always a good idea to update the hostname from the default one. On a new install, the hostname is always set as fedora. Let’s update it to the hostname of out choice. I will use personal-pc as my new hostname.

To update using the UI, go to the Settings -> About -> Device Name then enter the new hostname in the Rename Device pop up dialog box. Check this screenshot

Enable dnf fastest mirror

DNF offers a set of modules which you can enable on your system.

Fastest mirror is a plugin which determines the nearest mirror available to you. If you are located from Asia or Africa for instance, the plugin will find a mirror near you geographically instead of downloading all packages from the US.

To enable this plugin:

Install the dnf plugins core - it should be already installed

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sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core

Edit /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and append the following lines

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fastestmirror=true
deltarpm=true

Then update and upgrade the system

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sudo dnf update
sudo dnf upgrade

The plugin will work automatically from now on when you run DNF.

Enable third party repositories

To enable third party repositories, Open - Software -> Software Repositories -> Third Party Repositories -> Enable All

5. Enable rpm-fusion

Some packages are not available to be installed from the official Fedora repositories. Most of the time, you can find those packages that you need in RPM Fusion. It’s a repository which ships what Fedora doesn’t accept.

RPM Fusion is a software repository, providing add-on packages for the Fedora distribution of the Linux computer operating system. It was born as a merge of the older repositories Livna, Dribble and Freshrpms.

To enable access to both the free and the nonfree repository use the following command:

Free

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

Non Free:

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

After you’ve added those repositories. You can go ahead and install any package you need from RPM Fusion.

Install vim

Fedora 34 comes with nano text editor installed and set as default. If you are a vim user like me, you would want to install it before proceeding. vim is available in the default Fedora repositories so let’s install it with this command:

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sudo dnf install -y vim

Vim manages its configuration in the file ~/.vimrc. I normally set some defaults before proceeding, so lets add following content:

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vim ~/.vimrc

Enter the following content to enable syntax highlighting, set tab rules and enable auto indenting:

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syntax on
set shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 expandtab
set autoindent

Install Google Chrome

Google chrome is currently the most popular web browser. The best way to install and keep up-to-date with Google Chrome browser in Fedora 34 is use Google’s own dnf repository.

To enable google dnf repository:

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sudo dnf install -y fedora-workstation-repositories
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled google-chrome

Now install google chrome:

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sudo dnf install -y google-chrome-stable

Install Gnome Tweak Tool & Settings

Gnome Tweak Tool is a tool that allows you to have more customization on your system. Instal it with this command:

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sudo dnf install gnome-tweak-tool

Conclusion

From the above list, you should be ready to use Fedora 34.