Quick tips: Getting the most out of Fedora (add yours)

Fedora/RHEL
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Figured we’d start a running list of Fedora tips, the kind of stuff that’s obvious once you know it but easy to miss when you’re getting settled in. Add yours below.

Enable RPM Fusion. Most of the multimedia codecs, NVIDIA drivers, and various bits you’ll want aren’t in the default repos for licensing reasons. The free and nonfree repos take two minutes to set up and save you a lot of head scratching later.

dnf is faster now. If you’re coming from older Fedora habits, dnf5 is a BIG speed jump. Worth getting comfortable with dnf history too.

dnf history undo is your safety net. Every install and update is tracked as a transaction, so if an update breaks something you can roll the whole thing back with one command instead of hunting down what changed:

Don’t fight the six month cycle, lean into it. Fedora moves fast and that’s the point. Run updates regularly rather than letting them pile up, and do the version upgrade with dnf system-upgrade when a new release lands rather than waiting until you’re two versions behind.

Btrfs snapshots come basically free. The default layout is Btrfs, so tools like snapper or even manual snapshots before a big change give you a quick way back if something goes wrong.

Flatpak fills the gaps. Between the official repos, RPM Fusion, and Flathub you can find almost anything. Just be aware you may have both a Fedora Flatpak remote and Flathub, and the Flathub version is usually the one you want.

SELinux is on for a reason, don’t just disable it. If something’s getting blocked, check the logs with ausearch or sealert first. Nine times out of ten there’s a proper fix that doesn’t mean turning the whole thing off.

dnf-automatic if you want hands off updates. You can have it download and optionally apply updates on a schedule, handy on machines you don’t log into every day:

That’s a start. What are your go to Fedora tips? Drop them below.

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Weekly Forum Summary
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So, I’m on Fedora Sway Atomic for a good while now. My updates look like this:
rpm-ostree update
reboot
flatpak update

In that order. Is this… good? Am I missing anything?

Usually the only thing that has issues is Nvidia drivers. Basically I think the host has its drivers then flatpaks runtime has its drivers and they gotta match, once I figured that out, no issues.

I have maybe one application installed in it’s own alternate container, I never really think to update that container’s file system much (packet tracer in ubuntu podman container) but it still works.

Anyways, on my atomic system does this seem like the correct way to stay up to date?

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With your pattern, you can update your flatpaks before the reboot as that wont be impacted by ostree. (/home and other directories flatpak uses are in a an lvfs managed volume separate to / and anything ostree touches.)

Also in some major updates, you may have to use ostree’s rebase feature. I’d also recommend creating your own personal oci image so ostree spends less time calculating diffs when the time to update comes. (Ive done so before, its hard at first but so worth it.)

Edit: On mobile so spag is really bad. Apologies.

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Thanks for the information and tips. I will work on making a perconal oci image. It’s something I’ve heard of and have been putting off getting into, but no time like the present.

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I do have a pretty minimal repo you can use (if you want to) as a base for setting up your own OCI image, it’s based off bazzite (was made bc the original image had programs I never use) but can be easily moved over to use the base kinoite image for regular fedora with some minor corrections. :slight_smile:

It comes with some modifications including some security enhancement configs such as ASLR. (It’s still basic rn, but I’m working to improve it for personal use. You’ll need to rebase with bootc.

:warning: Do not ever rebase from bazzite to kiniote or vice versa.

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Sure I’d like to take a look, maybe this can help me get an idea for how that whole process works. Where can I find your repo?

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Yep, do note this is an example usage of the ublue image template they provide for bazzite. Although it tool a lot of figuring out to know what i was doing XD.

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