Fedora as your daily driver

Find Your Way Around KDE Plasma

Welcome to your brand-new Fedora KDE Plasma desktop!

KDE feels similar to other operating systems you already know. You’ll very quickly learn how to navigate your new desktop.

To give you a quick overview, here are the most important features:

Application Launcher: The Fedora symbol will open a menu from which you can easily start your applications by clicking on their icons. You can also use the "Search…" field to search for the name of the application you want to launch. The Application Launcher is also the place where to shutdown or restart your computer. You can also lock your screen, log out or even change users on-the-fly if you share your computer with other persons (more on that later).
Discover: Use it to explore, install and update your applications. Please refer to the Fedora Discover documentation page for more information on how to manage your apps.
Dolphin file browser: You can explore the filesystem of your computer and also network filesystems on your local network. Any attached USB drives will automatically show up in Dolphin. Click on the USB name to activate or "mount" the USB before accessing the files. Remember to click the "eject" symbol before removing the USB drive. Ejecting the drive is essential on Linux.
System Tray: Contains information about notifications, clipboard content, audio volume and devices, network connections etc. Next to it you will find the current time and date. You should regularly update all installed packages. When this symbol shows up in your System Tray, new updates are available:

Clicking it will open a Discover update window from which you can start the update of all packages. Discover will ask you to restart the system to install updates. Do this. We recommend you use this method until you want to learn to use the command line.
System Settings: This is the configuration hub of your computer. It lets you adjust your system. System settings are arranged thematically. Take your time to explore your settings and make use of the Help button to familiarize yourself with the options you have for each setting. If you accidentally make a change that you don’t know how to undo, clicking the Defaults button will restore a usable setting. If you don’t know where to look for a certain setting, KDE Plasma has you covered: simply enter what you’re looking for in the "Search…" field on top and System Settings will point you to the right section.

Explore your new OS.

Don’t be afraid. "Dangerous" operations will require you to enter your password to authorize them so it’s quite difficult to accidentally damage your system.

Accessibility

Fedora KDE Plasma comes with accessibility features. You can access them by opening "System Settings" and then the "Accessibility" menu.

KDE Plasma features include:

a screen reader
magnification tools
color correction for people with color blindness

Please note that some applications like LibreOffice have their own or additional accessibility features. Take a look at their documentation for more information.

KDE Plasma has accessibility features, yet we know they may be incomplete. We advise you to thoroughly test the Fedora KDE Plasma Live environment before installing to determine whether the available features meet your requirements.

Finding new software

Discover is a graphical way to download and install and update software.

Fedora has several Software Repositories (Repos) which Discover will download from. This guide will deal with Fedora’s main repo to install software from. To do so, whenever searching software in Discover, select the result that is not labelled "Flatpak". Flatpaks are a different method for distributing software which has certain pros and cons. For now, use the versions not labelled "Flatpak" until you’re an advanced user and feel confident diving deeper into the Flatpak topic.

Setting up email

You can install Mozilla Thunderbird from Discover by searching for "Thunderbird". It is an established and popular email client. We recommend reading Mozilla’s Get started with Thunderbird guide how to set up Thunderbird.

If you’ve exported your mail and settings from Thunderbird on your old OS, you can import them in Thunderbird on Fedora.

Browsing the web

Fedora KDE Plasma comes with Firefox browser pre-installed. Your Firefox experience is the same on Fedora Linux as it is on your previous OS. Users of other browsers should be able to adapt to Firefox as it shares most features with other major browsers.

If you used Firefox in your old OS and made an export, you can keep your configuration.

Follow this guide to restore Firefox data from your old OS to Firefox on Fedora.

You can also set up Firefox Sync which can transfer your passwords and bookmarks.

Using LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a full-fledged office suite that comes pre-installed in Fedora. The suite consists of the following components:

Calc: do calculations in spreadsheets
Draw: create vector drawings
Impress: design and present slides
Math: write and typeset mathematical formulas
Writer: word processing

LibreOffice uses the open source Open Document Format
It can read most file formats of other office suites. You should have no trouble opening and editing your existing documents. However, you should check the formatting of documents imported from commercial software, as commercial software often introduces new "features" which can mess with Open Document formats. To fix this, recommend LibreOffice to your workmates .

LibreOffice is a full-featured suite. To learn how to use it, refer to LibreOffice’s extensive online help system.

LibreOffice has its own accessibility documentation.

Setting up a printer

Fedora uses the CUPS print service for printing. You can use many printers using either USB or even network / Wi-Fi connections.

To install the printer, either attach it to you computer via USB or connect it to you network. Switch on the printer.

Open System Settings Printer.

Click "+ Add…". If your printer is supported, it will be discovered and you can add the printer after adjusting the settings.

Using a scanner

Fedora uses the SANE backend for scanning. The SANE project has a partial list of Supported Devices. However, even if your device is not listed there, it may well be supported. If in doubt, give it a try!

To scan, open the Skanpage app from the application menu which comes pre-installed.

After adjusting the settings to your liking you can start scanning by clicking on "Scan". If you have multiple pages to scan, simply swap pages and click "Scan" again until all pages are scanned. You can save the scan and export it to PDF using the buttons at the top of Skanpage.

Setting up sync’n’share

KDE Plasma has out-of-the-box support for the for syncing images and documents:

ownCloud
Nextcloud
Other services

To add these accounts, open "System Settings", find "Online Accounts" and click on "Add Account…" to configure your account. The pop-up dialogue will tell you what can be synchronized for each service and it will guide you through the login process.

Gaming on Linux

Linux has a limited number of high-quality games available from Fedora for free. You can download them from within Discover by searching them.

SuperTuxKart (cart racer with cartoon characters)
Oad (Zero AD)
Luanti (formerly known as Minetest; once Luanti is loaded, you will need to download a game such as "Minetest" from within Luanti)
Xonotic (arena shooter)

Linux can also run AAA games, and games intended for Windows.
The primary tool for running Windows games is Wine, which stands for "Wine is not an emulator".

To make things easy, a graphical Wine configurator is included in the Fedora repositories. It is called Lutris and can be installed from Discover.

Lutris can connect to internet gaming services, or it can install games you already have.

Lutris also includes the automated installation of 'Retrogames'.

If a game does not run correctly in Lutris, a fix that often works is to change the Wine version by right clicking on the game and selecting configure runner options Wine version

Commercial gaming stores are supported in Fedora. You can find information regarding them elsewhere on the internet.

Audio

Music Playing

Elisa is the default music player in KDE. There are many more players available via Discover.

Audio Editing

Audacity is an audio recording and editing app. It features functions for noise reduction, speed change and much more. It is extendable via plugins and supports exporting audio in various formats.

To install Audacity from Discover, search for "Audacity".

Video

Video Playing

Videos will open in Dragon Player by default. There are many more video players available in Discover and the Fedora repos. If you want to use a different player, right click on the file and 'open with' your installed player of choice.

Out of the box, a fresh installation of Fedora KDE will only play fully free videos. If a video does not work, then the codec may not be included in Fedora because it either isn’t open source or its use must be licensed in certain countries.

Video Editing

There is a powerful, non-linear video editor called Kdenlive which integrates with KDE Plasma. It’s available in Discover; search for "Kdenlive".

Among other things it features

multi-track video / audio editing
title editor / generator
effects and filters for video and audio
proxy-editing for large video source files

It even covers professional video editing requirements.

Graphic Software

Linux has fantastic software for creating and manipulating images. All of the following apps are available in Discover:

Inkscape (vector graphics creation)
Krita (drawing and painting)
GIMP (Graphical Image Manipulation Program)

Screenshots

KDE Plasma comes with the screenshot app Spectacle. It’s located under "Utilities" in the Application Launcher. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to trigger a screenshot.

Shortcuts include:

Print Screen: start Spectacle
Meta+Print Screen: screenshot of active window
Shift+Print Screen: screenshot of desktop

There are many more shortcuts. Start Spectacle, click on Options Configure Spectacle… Shortcuts to view more.

Spectacle can also do screen recordings and save them as videos.

Photo viewing, management & editing

Fedora contains amazing photo manipulation and digital asset management (DAM) software. You can find all the following applications in Discover under Graphics Photography.

Gwenview: comes pre-installed with your KDE desktop. You can find it under Graphics Gwenview in the Application Launcher.
digiKam is a photo organizer and a RAW photo developer with tools to edit photos. It integrates well with KDE.
RawTherapee develops RAW photos. It has many options to tweak your photos. It can also apply LUTs to give your photos a grading of your choice.
darktable focusses on RAW image development, but implements a different UI concept than the previous two options.

Using portable drives / Transferring files between Linux and other OS

If you want to share files using an external drive (USB disk/SSD) between Linux and other OS, make sure the drive uses the filesystem that all involved systems can read and write.

Options:

exFAT: Default for USB drives, good cross-platform. Linux, macOS and Windows support this filesystem.
NTFS: Linux can read/write NTFS, but it’s mainly a Windows filesystem.
ext4: Great for Linux, but Windows and macOS cannot read it without extra software.

We generally recommend using exFAT for its wide compatibility with most OS and ext4 if the drive is only used on Linux.

On Windows, you can format removable drives via File Explorer (“Format…”) or Disk Management. On macOS, you can format a drive using the Disk Utility.

Formatting a drive will erase all data on it.

Making Backups

We recommend you routinely make backups. Backups will help you when your hard drive fails and also when you accidentally delete data.

One good option for managing backups is KBackup. Search for "KBackup" in Discover and install it. Afterward you can find it in the "Utilities" section of the Application Launcher. Once you start KBackup you will see a directory tree on the left-hand side.

Regularly back up your home directory. Select it in /home (its name corresponds to your username).

Create a backup profile by clicking on File Profile Settings.

If you want to save backups to removable media like a USB stick or an external hard drive, it makes sense to not keep unlimited backups but to limit the full backups to a certain number. Backing up you data every day is a good starting point. Click OK after adjusting the settings to your liking and save the profile from the "File" menu.

In the main KBackup screen, select a target, for example the path to your removable media. Clicking + Start Backup will then create your first backup.

A backup solution is only as good as your ability to actually restore data. KBackup will write so-called "tar balls" to your removable media. To restore data, attach your removable media, open Dolphin and browse it. To restore your data, double-click the oldest tar file and — if you need to restore the data — extract everything you want restored to /home. Since KBackup creates so-called "incremental backups", go through all tar files from oldest to youngest and extract your data from each of them.

It’s good practice to store your backup media safely. If you have a laptop it makes no sense to store your backup media in your laptop bag. If it gets stolen you lose both your laptop and your backup.

NVIDIA and Linux

The latest graphics drivers / libraries for NVIDIA graphics cards currently have closed source components. Therefore, purchasing a computer that has an NVIDIA graphics card is not recommended for users who wish to only use open source software.

AMD and Intel both have open source drivers available with no user configuration required in Fedora Linux.

If you already have a computer with NVIDIA, during installation of Fedora, the assistant asks you whether or not you would like to enable Third Party Repositories. One of those repositories contains the NVIDIA drivers.

If you are wondering "why don’t they tell me exactly what to do with NVIDIA and videos", it is due to legal reasons. Closed source software has different licencing conditions and different legal ramifications in different countries. This is one huge reason to go fully Open Source!

Your other option is to use the free NVIDIA 'nouveau' drivers that are included in Fedora - although they may not be suitable if you want to play AAA games. To do this, simply do not install any optional repos. If you need help with NVIDIA, see the Getting Help section below.

Managing Fedora

Updating Fedora

Fedora software and operating system can be updated from within Discover.

Select the "Updates" tab and wait for the package information refresh to finish. After that, you can click on Update all in the top right corner.

Removing Software

If you want to remove a piece of software, find it in the application launcher first.

You can right click the app and select "Uninstall or manage add-ons". Discover will open after, select Remove in the top right corner.

Upgrading Fedora to the Latest Release

Fedora releases two new versions each year. This guide covers Fedora release 44. New versions are constantly released and at some point you’ll want to upgrade to a newer version.

You can upgrade with KDE Discover. It will notify you.

If you have problems using Discover to upgrade between numbered Fedora versions, you can upgrade via command line. Follow the instructions at Upgrading Fedora Linux Using DNF System Plugin.

Getting Help with Fedora

The people at Fedora love helping! We strive to be professional and friendly in our communications.

You can get help with Fedora:

On Matrix at Fedora Chat in the #fedora room.
On Fedora Discussion.

When asking for help, please tell the team as much about your needs as possible.
You should include your Fedora version (e.g.) Fedora 44, your desktop (KDE Plasma if you followed this guide), what has happened, and what you want to happen. You can find the versions of your Fedora installation as well as of your DE in the System Settings under "About this System".

To branch out into the wide world of Fedora and the many possibilities we offer, visit The Fedora Project.

At this point, you should put this guide down, boot up Firefox, watch a video or play a game.
Come back and learn more when you are comfortable.

You are now a Linux user!

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