Fedora Workstation Documentation

These pages are a general guide to Fedora Workstation. They provide an overview of Workstation, and are intended for Workstation users and Fedora contributors. They should be useful for those who want to know how to use Workstation, as well as those who want to know how it is put together.

User Help

The content in these pages is technical in nature. If you don’t want to know about the technical aspects of Workstation, our web page provides an introduction to what you can expect from Fedora Workstation as a user.

Information on how to use the Workstation desktop can be found in the GNOME user help. This includes an overview of the desktop, as well as docs on using the apps and system settings.

Overview

Fedora Workstation is Fedora’s official desktop edition. It provides a powerful, easy to use desktop experience. Workstation is intended to be a great general purpose desktop. It also aims to be a fantastic platform for software developers.

Workstation is part of the Fedora project. As such, it shares components, tools, and processes with other Fedora Editions and Spins. However, Workstation is also an independent project, which is able to make its own design and technical decisions, and is a distinct product of its own.

The Workstation Working Group is the team that has responsibility for Fedora Workstation. However, Workstation wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of teams and individuals across the entire Fedora community.

System Requirements

To have a good experience, hardware with a 40GB SSD disk and 4GB RAM is recommended for Fedora Workstation. However, it is possible to use hardware with lower specifications.

Workstation images are available for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures, providing support for Intel, AMD and ARM processors.

Getting Workstation

Fedora Workstation comes preinstalled on a number of hardware options. It can also be manually installed using a USB flash drive. The Fedora Workstation download page provides information on how to do this.

What’s Included

Workstation is built from open source components, many of which are shared with other Fedora Editions and Spins. Key components include the Linux kernel, systemd, DNF, the Wayland display server, the Pipewire multimedia server, NetworkManager, the GNOME Desktop, and the Firefox browser. Each of these components are carefully integrated and tested, to work together as part of a seamless experience.

Workstation also includes a default set of preinstalled applications, to make it easy to get started, and to provide the range of standard utilities that are necessary for a desktop.

In order to prevent Workstation systems from becoming unusable, certain key components are required to be installed, and cannot be removed. These non-removable components include gnome-shell, gnome-control-center, grub, and NetworkManager.

Getting Involved

There are lots of ways to participate in Fedora Workstation. For users, the best places to start include:

Participating in Fedora Discussions
Chatting in the #workstation channel
Providing support to other users in Ask Fedora

If you want to help with Fedora Workstation, there are also lots of teams that you can join, including:

Fedora project teams, including Websites, Design, QA, Packaging and Documentation.
Upstream projects, particularly the GNOME Project, which is responsible for much of the Workstation experience.
The Workstation Working Group, which is open to anyone who wants to be involved in the day to day decisions around Workstation.

Want to help? Learn how to contribute to Fedora Docs ›