Whether you are a new or long time Fedora Workstation user, you might be looking for some quick tips to customize, tweak or enhance your desktop experience. In this article, we’ll round up five tips to help you get more out of your Fedora Workstation.
Enhancing photos with GNOME Photos
GNOME Photos is a photo library application for sorting and organizing your photo library. Additionally it features basic image editing tools for quick edits. This article walks you through the basics of editing images with GNOME Photos
Try Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code is a Open Source text editor that includes debugging features, embedded git control, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring tools. This article walks you through how to install Visual Studio Code on Fedora. Additionally it also covers basic usage tips.
Dash to Dock Extension
Dash to Dock takes the dock that is visible in the GNOME Shell Overview, and places it on the main desktop. This provides a view of open applications at a glance, and provides a quick way to switch windows using the mouse.
This article covers how to install the extension, as well as covering the basic features and settings.
Using Nautilus Scripts
Scripts in Nautilus are not a new feature, but still super useful for automating quick tasks into the File Browser.
Installing more Wallpapers
The Fedora repositories contain a treasure trove of wallpapers created for Fedora releases. This article shows you the wallpapers available from previous releases — going back to Fedora 8 — and what packages to install to get them on your current Fedora install.
Danniello
It is some sort of bug in fedoramagazine.org engine or are you using some sort of mouse click spoof/protection?!
In Firefox I cannot open linked articles in new tab via MMB – it is opening in the same tab. Even RMB is automatically opening link in the same tab!
Why are you doing this?! Perhaps “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”™ of fedoramagazine.org. If yes – authors of articles should consider adding text links instead of click protected frames, because it is very annoying.
Thomas
Already a right-button click triggers the open in same tab. This is annoying yes.
svsv sarma
I like tips & tricks since the time I know the computers. But there are too many docks! I feel the window list is more useful than the docks, If only it auto hides!
This article brings awareness. Thanx.
jakfrost
Builder is far superior to VsCode, if only simply because it is entirely open source, but not only for that reason. It comes out of the box ready to make flatpaks of your app, if you want. It has come a long way since it’s early days, and the Gnome team should be recognized for their efforts with it. Builder is a better IDE on Fedora than MS Visual Code CE ever will be!
Dragnucs
Agree, VSCode is given more credit than it is due.
I was down here to make your exact comment. All I can add is that Builder is native and more integrated into Fedora in comparison to VSCode.
Jon
Builder is absolutely amazing. I use both VSCode and Builder, but Builder is just fantastic.
Clément Verna
Hi @jakfrost, there were already a few Fedora Magazine article on gnome Builder but nothing about how to use it to build flatpak, I think that would be an awesome article, would you be interested in writing it ?
jakfrost
Perhaps I will @Clement Verna. It certainly would be an interesting exercise, and I do want an excuse to use builder for building a flatpak.
Jakfrost
Done!
Rene Reichenbach
It strongly depends what you gonna do with the editor like the target programming language and such … e.g. for Markdown text editing and/or go(lang) coding builder is sadly not competitive. Still builder is a great tool and everyone should at least try if it suits him/her.
VSCode is just a more flexible tool given the ready to use extensions. And AFAIK its open source too. Only the provided binaries are not “free to distribute” but free to download and use.
Steve
Gnome builder is better than VsCode by a long shot!
Joe
I like Dash to Panel better. Dash to Dock actually stutters on my core i7 laptop. For those transitioning from Windows, definitely use dash to panel
jesse
I have really liked KDE since I tried it.
Plasma is the name of the Desktop Environment. KDE vs Gnome but both run great on Fedora 29.
KDE offers a really polished experience out of the box. If you are coming from Windows, KDE Plasma desktop, may be best for you. KDE does offer its own Distribution (KDE NEON) but Plasma, runs great on Fedora 29 too.
Try it! Runs really smooth. Gnome extensions stutter too and have taken a lot of resources.
I love Gnome too.. don’t get me wrong, but Plasma, is really cool.
Joe
I have tried KDE before switching to Gnome. KDE on my laptop (a dell i7559) had a lot of issues, even after installing the graphic drivers. It never respected the power management changes I gave it, and felt overall bland. I really wanted KDE to work, but it didn’t as expected and had to switch. So far, gnome has not given me much headaches as I thought it would do.
Luca
Unfortunately, on Fedora KDE is not accurately maintained. I’ve read its wiki on how to install KDE:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KDE
and after using this simple command:
dnf install @kde-desktop
I have a non working KDE desktop (I don’t have application bar…).
So I’ll try KDE NEON
Silvia
What is not maintained is the wiki, not the desktop. You may want to look in Fedora Docs as well as the Spins section. I installed KDE along Gnome in two laptops without an issue. Now I have the KDE Spin and works perfectly.
Silvia
I love VS Code. I use it with KDE and it works so nicely.
Jack Lupton
The best wallpaper as far as I’m concerned is Google Earth for Gnome. It’s incredible really and I don’t usually care about these things.