Things I do after a fresh Fedora install

Fedora 20 works pretty well out of the box but you have to remember that Fedora keeps their distro pure so nothing proprietary can be packaged with the mainline release. That's where the rpmfusion repos come into play. More on that below.

The very first thing I do after booting into my desktop (Gnome 3.10) for the first time is to rearrange my dual monitors - they are backwards no matter how I route the VGA and DVI cables that run them... My system is a dell e6520 laptop with a quad core i7 CPU, nVidia GPU (Need to disable dell Optimus graphics in bios) and 16GB of 1800mhz RAM.

Secondly, I need to add the desktop shortcut for gnome-terminal so I can start tweaking without having to go find and launch the terminal each time. I have been used to using ctrl+alt+t so that's what I'll set gnome for.

Find the Gnome settings drop down n the upper right hand corner:




Find keyboard:




Select the shortcut tab and create a new shortcut. I call mine Terminal and then enter gnome-terminal as the command. Hit apply and then click on the text that says 'disabled' and then hit your key sequence. Now anytime I hit ctrl+alt+t my terminal window springs up.




Now we'll need to update the system with

Code:

sudo yum update

Type your user password (it won't display) and hit enter, answer the questions y/n, etc and then accept any pgp keys that fedora packages are signed with. When this is complete I always reboot since there is a 99% chance that you now have a new kernel.

Prior to reboot, I change my mount options in fstab to add the special mount options for my SSDs

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Boot into your updated system.

Now let's add the RPM Fusion repos so we can install extra and non-free packages.

Follow the instructions to enable RPM Fusion free for Fedora 20 and secondly RPM Fusion nonfree for Fedora 20 through this link (and then come right back )
Configuration - RPM Fusion

Once this completes, let's grab gnome-tweak-tool from RPMfusion so we can customize the DE a bit (necessary to fix fonts).

Code:

sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool

Now run tweak tool and make any changes you'd like. I turn on desktop icons and configure fonts along with a few other small tweaks (date and seconds in top bar, etc.)

#### sidenote, yum allows you to search all the installed repos for packages even if you don't know what they are called. I recently installed the yubikey gui by searching with

Code:

sudo yum search yubikey

I was able to easily see that the package was actually called yubikey-personalization-gui ####

Make your font choices look like the below picture including the hinting and antialiasing settings. This will make your f20 install more enjoyable although still not as clean as Ubuntu or Mint - it can be done but the liberation sans fonts are good enough for me.




Install Adobe Flash
64-bit

Code:

sudo yum -y install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

32-bit

Code:

sudo yum -y install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

Install (for either 32 or 64 bit)

Code:

sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
sudo yum -y install flash-plugin

I install Google Chrome as I like the way it renders better than FF - it's also less memory leaky in my experience
First we need to add the Chrome repository:

Code:

sudo gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo

This creates and opens the new file in a text editor. Add the below depending on your arch and save:

32-bit

Code:

[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome - 32-bit
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

64bit

Code:

[google-chrome]
name=google-chrome - 64-bit
baseurl=http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/rpm/stable/x86_64
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

Now install Chrome with one of the following commands (I use beta)

Code:

yum install google-chrome-stable

Code:

yum install google-chrome-beta

Code:

yum install google-chrome-unstable

One thing to note about Fedora is that it's the bleeding edge test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux so it updates rapidly. I run a

Code:

sudo yum update

daily and almost always have updates. They really listen to those bug reports and make upstream corrections rapidly. Another thing that's up to date is the fedora kernels. They are frequent and current with the mainline kernels that Linus pushes out with just a short delay by Fedora for tweaking.

Here's my system running smoothly via top:


and in system monitor:

 

Almost forgot - multimedia codecs to get proprietary formats to play: mp3, mp4, etc.

Code:

sudo yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

 

@kckndrgn I've had the above mentioned Chrome-beta running for days at a time with no issue. More plugins = more headaches which is why I don't get too much into themes and other desktop plugins that are outside of the fedora branch. too many headaches.

My system (as is this server) is rock solid, secure and a joy to use.