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As many of you may know, I am a Linux user and I mostly use Arch, NixOS, or an RPM based distro like Fedora and openSUSE. I usually do some tweaking whenever I have a newly installed system mainly to improve system performance as well as to have my system more visually appealing.
There are already a handful of post-install tweak guides out there but I will show you what I compiled from them and use personally.
Speed up DNF
A lot of people will complain that DNF is slow and they are correct. Compared to apt and pacman, dnf will feed slow. To counter that problem, we’ll add the following lines to our /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file.
fastestmirror=true
deltarpm=true
max_parallel_downloads=10
fastest mirror will allow dnf to select the fastest mirror for your downloads.
deltarpm will tell dnf to download only the delta updates, meaning, it will not download the whole package/update, it will only download the changes from the previous package version. max_parallel_downloads will enable dnf to have up to 10 simultaneous downloads. I am not sure why all of these are not enabled by default.
Update system
I always do a system update after enabling above in my /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file. That way, updates will be faster.
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
sudo dnf check
sudo dnf autoremove
sudo fwupdmgr get-devices
sudo fwupdmgr refresh --force
sudo fwupdmgr get-updates
sudo fwupdmgr update
sudo reboot now
Change hostname
Default hostname is for newly installed fedora release is always localhost. I change this to fedora using below command:
hostnamectl set-hostname fedora
BTRFS file system optimizations
Starting Fedora 33, default filesystem will be btrfs. I have used Willi Mutschler’s guide for optimization. Most of what I will write here is a direct excerpt from his blog.
- ssd: use SSD specific options for optimal use on SSD and NVME
- noatime: prevent frequent disk writes by instructing the Linux kernel not to store the last access time of files and folders
- space_cache: allows btrfs to store free space cache on the disk to make caching of a block group much quicker
- commit=120: time interval in which data is written to the filesystem (value of 120 is taken from Manjaro’s minimal iso)
- compress=zstd: allows to specify the compression algorithm which we want to use. btrfs provides lzo, zstd and zlib compression algorithms. Based on some Phoronix test cases, zstd seems to be the better performing candidate.
- discard=async: Btrfs Async Discard Support Looks To Be Ready For Linux 5.6
So add these options to your btrfs subvolume mount points in your fstab:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
# UUID=47faf958-b80a-43e1-a36f-ca5a932474f7 / btrfs subvol=root,x-systemd.device-timeout=0,ssd,noatime,space\_cache,commit=120,compress=zstd,discard=async 0 0
\# UUID=04ae92cd-717c-4aaf-bb24-58001be8d334 /boot ext4 defaults 1 2
\# UUID=C17B-722D /boot/efi vfat umask=0077,shortname=winnt 0 2
\# UUID=47faf958-b80a-43e1-a36f-ca5a932474f7 /home btrfs subvol=home,x-systemd.device-timeout=0,ssd,noatime,space\_cache,commit=120,compress=zstd,discard=async 0 0
\# UUID=47faf958-b80a-43e1-a36f-ca5a932474f7 /btrfs\_pool btrfs subvolid=5,x-systemd.device-timeout=0,ssd,noatime,space\_cache,commit=120,compress=zstd,discard=async 0 0
sudo mkdir -p /btrfs\_pool
sudo mount -a
Note that I also add a mountpoint for the btrfs root filesystem (this has always id 5) for easy access of all my subvolumes in /btrfs_pool. You would need to restart to make use of the new options. I usually first run updates and restart prior to restoring my backups, such that my restored files are using the optimized mount options such as compression.
Furthermore, as I am using btrfs discard support, let’s check whether the discard option is passed on in /etc/crypttab (as I am using LUKS to encrypt my drives):
sudo nano /etc/crypttab
# luks-fcc669e7-32d5-43b2-ba03-2db6a7f5b33d UUID=fcc669e7-32d5-43b2-ba03-2db6a7f5b33d none discard
As both fstrim and discard=async mount option can peacefully co-exist, I also enable fstrim.timer:
sudo systemctl enable fstrim.timer
Add ble.sh
I have tried zsh and fish for my system shells and I found that setting them up can be quite cumbersome. I still prefer to use bash due to its speed and since it is already the default shell in most distros anyway. I miss autocomplete and syntax highlighting feature of both zsh and fish offers so I searched for a way to have those feature in bash. Here is where ble.sh will come in.
Bash Line Editor (ble.sh) is a command line editor written in pure Bash scripts which replaces the default GNU Readline. It offers syntax highlighting, enhanced completion, and vim editing mode.
To install, use below commands:
Quick INSTALL to BASHRC (If this doesn't work, please follow Sec 1.3)
git clone --recursive <https://github.com/akinomyoga/ble.sh.git>
make -C ble.sh install PREFIX=~/.local
echo 'source ~/.local/share/blesh/ble.sh' >> ~/.bashrc
Enable RPM fusion and additional repositories
You need to enable RPM fusion repositories to have access to both free and nonfree software.
sudo dnf install <https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$>(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm <https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$>(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
AppStream metadata
RPM Fusion repositories also provide Appstream metadata to enable users to install packages using Gnome Software/KDE Discover.
sudo dnf groupupdate core
Multimedia post-install
sudo dnf groupupdate multimedia --setop="install\_weak\_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin
Enable Flathub repository
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub <https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo>
That’s about it. Other post setup installation are handled by my Ansible playbook. I just pull down my playbook and run ansible and all the other packages should be installed.
Hopefully this has been a help to you in configuring your own setup.