Continuing our Fedora articles (click here and here), now here is our traditional list of tips & tricks to begin with Fedora after installing it to our computer but with the point of view of an Ubuntu user. Currently, we are having Fedora version 32 to Rawhide, ranging between versions 3.38 to 40 of its GNOME desktop, and these are applicable to any of them and hopefully in the future versions as well. Okay, now let's try Fedora together and go!

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Read System Details

 
    Apps used: About, Disks, and Baobab
 

First things first. Of course as a starter, you would want to know about your computer system's details. To do so, open up the start menu (press Super) and type About and just press Enter. Just like with Ubuntu, a window will open and tell you information about your computer hardware, operating system, and desktop environment. With Fedora 24 on my T430 as example, this About will tell me Intel Core i5 as CPU, Intel HD Graphics as GPU, 4GB as RAM, and that I use Fedora 33 with GNOME 3.38 as desktop environment with Wayland technology below the infinite logo of Fedora.

To check up your storage system, type Disks on the start menu and just press Enter. Another window will open and tell you all disk drives you have including USB flash and CDROM if any. It divides into two parts, items on left side are your drives, items on right side are a drive's information. Particular to Fedora, it might show an additional item called zram which is your swap partition. At my computer, it shows four items, first is my hard disk drive (320GB), second is my DVDRW, third is my USB flash drive (32GB), and the last is my swap. However, my Fedora 33 is stored in the USB 32GB (I deliberately made it portable) with four partitions within it.

One thing useful, type baobab on start menu and just press Enter. A window named Disk Usage Analyzer will open and tell you detailed size information of each of all directories in your computer's storage. To use Baobab, first you choose the slash (/) filesystem and let Baobab scans your system and finally the result is showing as a list of your computer folders sorted out top-bottom from the largest to the smallest by size. You will find it easy to use as every folder got its own gauge bar representing its size compared to other folder's. Just like Disks too, it is divided into two sides, items on left side are the list, and items on right side are charts representing your directories. This is useful to know which folders eat up your disk space the most and which the less. We can use it at the beginning as a "before" and anytime later we could do a check again as an "after" to compare your files growth. As an example, in my freshly installed Fedora computer the largest folder is /usr (by 5GB) followed by /boot (150MB) and /var (135MB). Yours should be similar to these and similarly these folders will grow over the time. As an addition, I myself cannot tell how many this Baobab being useful to my life as I can quickly disposes data trashes to free up disk spaces after seeing the detailed scan result (and I use similar app too on Android phone named DiskUsage it is just as useful).

Software

App used: Software

This is the most important part but it takes a lot of time and internet quota*) to do so. I advise you to be patient with it. To use Software, you need to let it idle for several minutes/hours with internet access on and then follow its Update procedures by a restart and wait for some time until it is finished. Once finished, Software will be ready like pictured below. With this you can add a lot of (tens of thousands of) applications for any purpose you can think and imagine.

Do you want Flatpak? Click here and then download the Flathub repository file at that page and finally click Install button on Software to enable access to Flatpak -- that is, plenty of additional applications. Now, every time you choose to install one application in Software, look at top-right, it will show choices between normal and Flatpak sources if any.

For Ubuntu users, there are several apps which are not present by default. Some of them you may want to install:

• Mozilla Thunderbird (email)
  
• LibreOffice Math (equations)
  
• LibreOffice Draw (diagram/illustrator)
  
• LibreOffice Base (database)
  
• Transmission (bittorrent)

Setup Video/Audio Supports

Once you do the Update in Software above, full supports of MP3/MP4 will be added, then you can play mp3s and watch mp4s you like. Otherwise you cannot play them (or you should manually install the required programs simply by opening any mp3/mp4 with the player and follow the given instructions). Please note that Fedora (just like Ubuntu) is able to play audio/video out of the box if the formats are open (OGG/WEBM) so the issues only come from non-open formats (mp3/mp4) and people who own them. 

Terminal

App used: Terminal

As Ubuntu users, we are already accustomed to Ctrl+Alt+T key combination to open the Terminal. On Fedora, it is disabled. To enable it, we create a new shortcut key. To do so, go to Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > scroll to bottom > click Add > name it Terminal > give it command 'gnome-terminal' without quotes > click the association key and press the combination afterwards > OK. Now test it.

Connectivity

Basically to access a wifi internet, click the system tray > click Network > select a wifi hotspot > enter the password > OK > you are connected.

Finally, to create a hotspot from your laptop, open Settings > Network section > click Hamburger button > Turn on Wifi Hotspot > give your hotspot a name > give it a password > OK > a hotspot created > now let your friends to connect. Please note that this will disable your current wifi connection if your network device is only one and will not disable it if you have two (one to receive, one to give).

Happy computing!