Fedora 35 Workstation
I’ve been using Mate since GNOME 2 was shelved, then tried out Cinnamon for a short while which I wasn’t that fond of at the time then briefly switched to LXDE. That didn’t rock my world so I jumped to XFCE which I really liked a lot while trying to get used to the new GNOME for a long time, almost every release of Fedora the new GNOME just didn’t cut it for my daily work. But now that Fedora 35 released and some positive changes been made over the years to GNOME so I decided let’s try it once again. To my surprise, seems to work really well with Wayland and nVidia on the new laptop from work it seems to me the integrated Intel graphics is used but when running 3D programs it uses the nVidia card and my Workstation at home works well with X11, I have to test this a bit more since on the work computer though. But initially it’s a smooth experience with Fedora 35, GNOME 41 and nVidia 495.44 drivers from RPM Fusion. It is however some things missing for me to use it as the daily desktop environment so let’s dive into it.
Configuration
nano to vim
Personally not a big fan of nano and at some point Fedora uses this as default which I can respect, but let’s simply switch that out by executing the following:
dnf install -y vim-default-editor --allowerasing
nVidia
Install the RPM Fusion repositories:
dnf install -y \
https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-35.noarch.rpm \
https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-35.noarch.rpm
Upgrade Fedora to the latest software:
dnf upgrade --refresh -y
Reboot if needed then install the nVidia drivers via the Howto NVIDIA, for me it’s as simple as:
dnf install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda vulkan
GNOME Extensions - Bottom Panel & Legacy Tray icons
I need a bottom basic panel with a windows list, I find it cumbersome to use the Activities by moving the mouse to the top left corner, or the super button. When I’m drinking coffee with one hand I like to be able to quickly change windows with the mouse in the other, so let’s fix that.
Head over to GNOME Extensions and hit the ‘Click here to install browser extension’ to install the extension. Once that’s installed click the GNOME Extensions plugin in your browser. In the new tab that opens up click ‘Installed extensions’, scroll down to ‘Window List’ and enable it by using the slider to ‘ON’.
I use a couple of applications that uses legacy tray icons so I’m not ready to get rid of them just yet so I use the AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support which seems to do the job just fine. That’s all for the GNOME Extension parts.
GNOME Tweaks
Now for some basic configuration in GNOME, for this I need GNOME Tweaks, install it either through the Software application or terminal:
dnf install -y gnome-tweaks
Open that up and go through the tweaks, I use Focus on Hover, Week numbers in calendar, Center New Windows etc.
Disable user list at the login screen.
Source: Displaying a user prompt on the GNOME login screen
sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/dconf/db/gdm.d/01-hide-users' << EOF
[org/gnome/login-screen]
disable-user-list=true
EOF
sudo bash -c 'cat > /etc/dconf/profile/gdm' << EOF
user-db:user
system-db:gdm
EOF
sudo dconf update
sudo systemctl restart gdm # (or reboot)
Suddenly Windows starts maximized
If this problem occurs run:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter auto-maximize false
Should solve that issue.
For now I’m quite pleased with GNOME, they’ve made incredible work to it and the effort was well worth it, I’m still on X11 though (at login prompt use the bottom right cogwheel) since I still use some software that does not work on Wayland yet.
Steam - Counter-Strike Global Offensive
I noticed CS:GO didn’t start correctly and thought it was the old add -nojoy to parameters but still didn’t start, after some investigation creating a symlink solved that problem:
ln -s /usr/lib64/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.4 /path/to/csgobin/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.0
In my case it’s:
ln -s /usr/lib64/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.4 /storage/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Counter-Strike\ Global\ Offensive/bin/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.0
which I came across in this GitHub comment.
Will try to keep this page updated if there’s something else that pops up