I’m a serial distro jumper. I have been as far back as I can remember. I’d been on Kubuntu for quite a while, happy as can be, which obviously made me bored. With all the hype surrounding Fedora 35, I thought I’d give it a whirl! In a sense, it’s “coming home” for me: I started out on Mandrake way back in the late 90s followed by RedHat and Fedora Core for quite some time. So far, I’m loving Fedora! Here’s some quick tips and tricks I used to make Fedora my own.

ZFS Encrypted Home Directory

I love ZFS and disto-hopping, so using ZFS on a separate drive as my home directory was a no brainer! Here’s my guide on how you can set this up on Fedora or Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

KDE Native File Dialogs in Firefox

RPMFusion

RPM Fusion is where many of the apps and utilities you’ll want to use, but Fedora can’t/won’t distribute, live. Amongst these are the NVIDIA propriety drivers, HEIF support, etc.

RPMFusion is more or less “official” and is often referenced in the Fedora documentation. You can fairly safely add this repository without fear of configuration explosions or security risks.

Click this link, and choose your version of Fedora under the Graphical Setup heading: https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

Flathub

One of the great things about Fedora is it’s becoming built around the idea of having all of your apps installed as Flatpaks. This increases system security, ensures you always have the latest versions of apps, and make it easy to always run the same version of apps across multiple distros. This is really handy if you’re sharing files across distros.

While Fedora hosts many Flatpacked (I think that’s a verb) apps on their infrastructure, I prefer Flathub which tends to be a bit more up-to-date, has more apps, and is available on pretty much every distro available.

Here’s Flathub’s instructions on how to make their apps available in Fedora: https://flatpak.org/setup/Fedora/

Flatseal

(coming soon)

HEIC/HEIF Images in Gwenview & Dolphin

Gwenview is KDE’s default image viewer. It’s a great application, but it’s missing HEIF image support out-of-the-box. If you have an iPhone, this probably the format all of your photos are stored in. Luckily, adding HEIF support fore Gwenview is very simple in Fedora!

First, make sure to install the RPM Fusion repository. Instructions are above: https://www.shernet.com/linux/fedora-and-plasma-tips/#rpmfusion

Next, run the lines below to update your repository database and install the plugin.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install qt-heif-image-plugin

The steps below do no appear to be necessary in KDE 5.25+

Now that you have support for HEIC/HEIF installed, you can configure Dolphin to show image previews.

sudo nano /usr/share/kservices5/qimageioplugins/heic.desktop

Paste in the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=QImageIOPlugins
X-KDE-ImageFormat=heic
X-KDE-MimeType=image/heic
X-KDE-Read=true
X-KDE-Write=true

sudo nano /usr/share/kservices5/qimageioplugins/heif.desktop

Paste in the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=QImageIOPlugins
X-KDE-ImageFormat=heif
X-KDE-MimeType=image/heif
X-KDE-Read=true
X-KDE-Write=true

sudo nano /usr/share/kservices5/imagethumbnail.desktop

Add to the end of MimeTypes:

image/heic;image/heif;

Finally, log out and back in.

Thunderbird

Date/Time

For reasons I still can’t suss out (and I had these same issues with Kubuntu and Thunderbird installed from apt), I always end up with 24 hour dates in the mail list. Now, arguments over the best format aside, I’d really just like to see them as eg: 2:15 PM.

To fix this, 1st open Thunderbird then go to Preferences. Scroll to the bottom and click “Config Editor.”

Type in: intl.date_time.pattern_override.time_short
Click the “+” symbol to add a new config and choose “string”
Set it to: h:mm a

You can find all of your options here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-date-time-formats-thunderbird

Hiding the GRUB Boot Menu

(coming soon)

Unity3D

If you using Unity3D, you may find you have issues with Visual Studio Code, Omnisharp, and the version of mono that comes with Fedora. Here’s my quick fix:

That’s all! I hope you found some of these tips and tricks useful and enjoy what I’m finding to be a fantastic distro!