Welcome
This is the documentation for Fedora Minimal, a Fedora Spin that focuses on having:
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A small set of packages.
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A small size footprint.
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A small amount of complexity.
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A large amount of customizability.
This makes Fedora Minimal well suited to be used when you want to often rebuild, or redeploy, your system. Fedora Minimal also tries to serve well as a base for further customization.
Differences
While there is no over-arching definition of what makes Fedora there are things that the large majority of Fedora variants share. Fedora Minimal deviates from some of them. Due to the expectation that end-users will often customize their images at build-, or provision time these differences only apply to the images downloaded from the Fedora Website.
These are the differences we feel are the most important and users should be aware of before choosing to base their install on Fedora Minimal.
No firewalld
Many Fedora variants have firewalld installed and enabled by default. Fedora Minimal does not ship with firewalld nor any other firewall by default allowing you to pick and choose instead.
Starting from: Fedora 43.
ext4 on /
Most Fedora variants have btrfs on their root partition. It is something Fedora is well known for. Fedora Minimal opts to have the ext4 filesystem on its root partition:
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Our images want to require minimal support from firmware to be booted. This means that sometimes we have to deal with situations where firmware wants to read directly from the root filesystem. btrfs support exists in firmware such as u-boot, however it is often turned off or not available.
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We want to support
systemd-firstboot --image=for our users to provision images before booting them.systemd-firstboot --image=does not currently understand a btrfs root partition.
Because Fedora Minimal focuses on customizability it can be built with btrfs, see our blueprints.
Starting from: Fedora 38.
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