devangshekhawat / fedora-40-post-install-guide

Things to do after installing Fedora 40

Fedora 40 Post Install Guide

Things to do after installing Fedora 40

Faster Updates

• sudo nano /etc/dnf/dnf.conf
• Copy and replace the text with the following:

[main] 
gpgcheck=1 
installonly_limit=3 
clean_requirements_on_remove=True 
best=False 
skip_if_unavailable=True 
fastestmirror=1 
max_parallel_downloads=10 
deltarpm=true

• Note: The fastestmirror=1 plugin can be counterproductive at times, use it at your own discretion. Set it to fastestmirror=0 if you are facing bad download speeds. Many users have reported better download speeds with the plugin enables so it is there by default.

RPM Fusion

• Fedora has disabled the repositories for a lot of free and non-free .rpm packages by default. Follow this if you want to use non-free software like Steam, Discord and some multimedia codecs etc. As a general rule of thumb its advised to do this get access to many mainstream useful programs.
• If you forgot to enable third party repositories during the initial setup window, enable them by pasting the following into the terminal:
• 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
• also while you're at it, install app-stream metadata by
• sudo dnf groupupdate core

Update

• Go into the software center and click on update. Alternatively, you can use the following commands:
• sudo dnf -y update
• sudo dnf -y upgrade --refresh
• Reboot

Firmware

• If your system supports firmware update delivery through lvfs, update your device firmware by:

sudo fwupdmgr get-devices 
sudo fwupdmgr refresh --force 
sudo fwupdmgr get-updates 
sudo fwupdmgr update

NVIDIA Drivers

• Only follow this if you have a NVIDIA gpu. Also, don't follow this if you have a gpu which has dropped support for newer driver releases i.e. anything earlier than nvidia GT/GTX 600, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1600 and RTX 2000, 3000, 4000 series. Fedora comes preinstalled with NOUVEAU drivers which may or may not work better on those remaining older GPUs. This should be followed by Desktop and Laptop users alike.
• Disable Secure Boot.
• sudo dnf update #To make sure you're on the latest kernel and then reboot.
• Enable RPM Fusion Nvidia non-free repository in the app store and install it from there,
• or alternatively
• sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
• Install this if you use applications that can utilise CUDA i.e. Davinci Resolve, Blender etc.
• sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
• Wait for atleast 5 mins before rebooting, to let the kermel module get built.
• modinfo -F version nvidia #Check if the kernel module is built.
• Reboot

Battery Life

• Follow this if you have a Laptop and are facing sub optimal battery backup.
• power-profiles-daemon which come pre-configured works great on a great majority of systems but still in case you're facing sub-optimal battery backup you try installing tlp by:
• sudo dnf install tlp tlp-rdw
• and mask power-profiles-daemon by:
• sudo systemctl mask power-profiles-daemon
• Also install powertop by:
• sudo dnf install powertop
• sudo powertop --auto-tune

Media Codecs

• Install these to get proper multimedia playback.

sudo dnf groupupdate 'core' 'multimedia' 'sound-and-video' --setopt='install_weak_deps=False' --exclude='PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin' --allowerasing && sync
sudo dnf swap 'ffmpeg-free' 'ffmpeg' --allowerasing
sudo dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-{bad-\*,good-\*,base} gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 gstreamer1-libav --exclude=gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free-devel ffmpeg gstreamer-ffmpeg
sudo dnf install lame\* --exclude=lame-devel
sudo dnf group upgrade --with-optional Multimedia

H/W Video Acceleration

• Helps decrease load on the CPU when watching videos online by alloting the rendering to the dGPU/iGPU. Quite helpful in increasing battery backup on laptops.

H/W Video Decoding with VA-API

• sudo dnf install ffmpeg ffmpeg-libs libva libva-utils

Intel

• If you have a recent Intel chipset (5th Gen and above) after installing the packages above., Do:
• sudo dnf swap libva-intel-media-driver intel-media-driver --allowerasing

AMD

No need to do this for intel integrated graphics. Mesa drivers are for AMD graphics, who lost support for h264/h245 in the fedora repositories in f38 due to legal concerns.

• If you have an AMD chipset, after installing the packages above do:

sudo dnf swap mesa-va-drivers mesa-va-drivers-freeworld

OpenH264 for Firefox

• sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled fedora-cisco-openh264
• sudo dnf install -y openh264 gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 mozilla-openh264
• After this enable the OpenH264 Plugin in Firefox's settings.

Set Hostname

• hostnamectl set-hostname YOUR_HOSTNAME

Custom DNS Servers

• For people that want to setup custom DNS servers for better privacy

sudo mkdir -p '/etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d' && sudo -e '/etc/systemd/resolved.conf.d/99-dns-over-tls.conf'

[Resolve]
DNS=1.1.1.2#security.cloudflare-dns.com 1.0.0.2#security.cloudflare-dns.com 2606:4700:4700::1112#security.cloudflare-dns.com 2606:4700:4700::1002#security.cloudflare-dns.com
DNSOverTLS=yes

Set UTC Time

• Used to counter time inconsistencies in dual boot systems
• sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc '0'

Optimizations

• The tips below can allow you to squeeze out a little bit more performance from your system.

Disable Mitigations

• Increases performance in multithreaded systems. The more cores you have in your cpu the greater the performance gain. 5-30% performance gain varying upon systems. Do not follow this if you share services and files through your network or are using fedora in a VM.
• Modern intel CPUs (above 10th gen) do not gain noticeable performance improvements upon disabling mitigations. Hence, disabling mitigations can present some security risks against various attacks, however, it still might increase the CPU performance of your system.
• sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="mitigations=off"

Modern Standby

• Can result in better battery life when your laptop goes to sleep.
• sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="mem_sleep_default=s2idle"
• If "s2idle" doesn't work for you i.e. people with alder lake CPUs, then you might want to refer to this

Enable nvidia-modeset

• Useful if you have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU. Necessary for some PRIME-related interoperability features.
• sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="nvidia-drm.modeset=1"

Disable NetworkManager-wait-online.service

• Disabling it can decrease the boot time by at least ~15s-20s:
• sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager-wait-online.service

Disable Gnome Software from Startup Apps

• Gnome software autostarts on boot for some reason, even though it is not required on every boot unless you want it to do updates in the background, this takes at least 100MB of RAM upto 900MB (as reported anecdotically). You can stop it from autostarting by:
• sudo rm /etc/xdg/autostart/org.gnome.Software.desktop

Gnome Extensions

• Don't install these if you are using a different spin of Fedora.
• Pop Shell - run sudo dnf install -y gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell xprop to install it.
• GSconnect - run sudo dnf install nautilus-python for full support.
• Gesture Improvements
• Quick Settings Tweaker
• User Themes
• Compiz Windows Effect
• Just Perfection
• Rounded Windows Corners
• Dash to Dock
• Quick Settings Tweaker
• Blur My Shell
• Bluetooth Quick Connect
• App Indicator Support
• Clipboard Indicator
• Legacy (GTK3) Theme Scheme Auto Switcher
• Caffeine
• Vitals
• Wireless HID
• Logo Menu
• Space Bar

Apps [Optional]

• Packages for Rar and 7z compressed files support: sudo dnf install -y unzip p7zip p7zip-plugins unrar
• These are Some Packages that I use and would recommend:

Amberol
Blanket
Builder
Brave 
Blender
Discord
Drawing
Deja Dup Backups
Endeavour 
Easyeffects
Extension Manager
Flatseal
Foliate
Footage
GIMP
Gnome Tweaks
Gradience
Handbrake
Iotas
Joplin
Khronos
Krita
Logseq
lm_sensors
Onlyoffice
Overskride
Parabolic
Pcloud
PDF Arranger
Planify
Pika backup 
Snapshot
Solanum
Sound Recorder
Tangram
Transmission
Ulauncher
Upscaler
Video Trimmer
VS Codium
yt-dlp

Theming [Optional]

GTK Themes

• Don't install these if you are using a different spin of Fedora.
• https://github.com/lassekongo83/adw-gtk3
• https://github.com/vinceliuice/Colloid-gtk-theme
• https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic
• https://github.com/vinceliuice/Orchis-theme
• https://github.com/vinceliuice/Graphite-gtk-theme

Use themes in Flatpaks

• sudo flatpak override --filesystem=$HOME/.themes
• sudo flatpak override --env=GTK_THEME=my-theme

Icon Packs

• https://github.com/vinceliuice/Tela-icon-theme
• https://github.com/vinceliuice/Colloid-gtk-theme/tree/main/icon-theme

Wallpaper

• https://github.com/manishprivet/dynamic-gnome-wallpapers

Firefox Theme

• Install Firefox Gnome theme by: curl -s -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme/master/scripts/install-by-curl.sh | bash

Starship (terminal theme)

• Configure starship to make your terminal look good (refer https://starship.rs)

Grub Theme

• https://github.com/vinceliuice/grub2-themes

fedora-40-post-install-guide's Issues

Missing double quote

Trivial, but I think the line glxinfo|egrep "OpenGL vendor|OpenGL renderer should have a closing double quote.

turning off mitigations

greetings, again.

turning off mitigations, albeit the fact that it might increase the performance of ur cpu if it is old¹, can open up some vulnerabilities and decrease the security of ur system. mitigations were added to linux kernel as a workaround against various attacks (e.g. zombieload attack), unfortunately it comes with its compromises, hence disabling the migitations to gain back the performance loss can give its security drawback

Unfortunately there is no safe and secure way around the performance-penalties

hence, i think the readers should be aware of its consequences, like just keeping a note before disabling it.

regards.

Footnotes

1. it was found out that disabling mitigations do not give any noticeable performance difference in 10th gen intel cpus and higher. ↩

intel package conflict

Hello! During installing intel-media-driver, got following error:

user@laptop:~$ sudo dnf install intel-media-driver
Last metadata expiration check: 0:04:33 ago on Thu 07 Mar 2024 10:41:45 AM EST.
Dependencies resolved.
===============================================================================================================================
 Package                           Architecture          Version                        Repository                        Size
===============================================================================================================================
Installing:
 intel-media-driver                x86_64                24.1.3-2.fc40                  rpmfusion-nonfree                6.8 M

Transaction Summary
===============================================================================================================================
Install  1 Package

Total size: 6.8 M
Installed size: 34 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
[SKIPPED] intel-media-driver-24.1.3-2.fc40.x86_64.rpm: Already downloaded                                                     
Running transaction check
Transaction check succeeded.
Running transaction test
The downloaded packages were saved in cache until the next successful transaction.
You can remove cached packages by executing 'dnf clean packages'.
Error: Transaction test error:
  file /usr/lib64/dri/iHD_drv_video.so from install of intel-media-driver-24.1.3-2.fc40.x86_64 conflicts with file from package libva-intel-media-driver-24.1.3-3.fc40.x86_64
```

using zswap and zram together

greetings,

thank you for a nice tutorial article, it is the most comprehensive and best i've read, thus far. however, I've notice in your article that u advised to use zswap and zram together. zram is already working out of the box in fedora, and u recommended turning on the zswap module without disabling the other. since as far as im aware those two are not recommended to run at the same time. enabling both can result in wasted cpu cycles since it will result in redundant compression of the same pages.

moreover, zswap is also known to be buggy and lead to kernel stack traces and zombie/hung process, as reported anecdotically. personally, im using zram, but i think if u will recommend enabling zswap, u should also have them disable zram to avoid cpu drawbacks.

regards.

Battery Life Section Uses apt Command

As title says, a command to install powertop is shown to use apt instead of dnf. Just a small issue.

Provide information about how to reset certain optimizations

Hi,

The document is wonderful and provides a lot of useful stuff to start off your fedora journey. I would like to remove certain optimizations that has been made/suggested in this document. Please add information related to that. I am noticibaly seeing a lag in wireless keyboard & mouse input after using one of the optimizations (Not sure which one).

Clearer explanations about what each thing does, when to apply it, and whats optional.

Hey, I realise that this might be your own personal repository - but you happen to be the second result found on Google relating to Fedora and battery life issues.

I've got a Dell Inspiron laptop and I had a few questions related to your install guide.

May I suggest you add a few things:

• A clear explanation about what each thing does.
• An explanation about when and why to implement the fixes.
• eg. Why install Nvidia drivers if you have an AMD card. Or performing battery life fixes on a desktop PC with no battery. Or whether System76 fixes are specific to S76 devices. Gnome fixes, if you're not using Gnome...