Upgrading to Fedora 28 was quite a smooth experience, on all 3 of my computers, two upgraded from Fedora 27 and one installed from scratch. Here’s a few tweaks I did afterwards to make it better suited for my use case.
Nautilus
As you may know, Nautilus is the default “Files” application in Fedora or rather, in Gnome 3.x. There is a Python interface to add extensions and include useful custom functionality. One of these extensions is nautilus-git-gui that provides access to Git-Gui and Gitk from the context menu in Nautilus. To install the extension, we first need to install the python2-nautilus package using dnf, as follows:
$ sudo dnf install python2-nautilus
Then we clone the above Git repo and copy (or link) it so Nautilus can find it.
$ git clone https://github.com/lamsh/nautilus-git-gui
$ ln -s nautilus-git-gui ~/.local/share/nautilus-python/extensions
And we kill the running instance of nautilus, so it restarts and takes the extension:
$ nautilus -q
After this, right-clicking on a free area in the Nautilus windows, brings up the context menu with two new items: “Git GUI Here” and “Gitk Here”.
Another quick addition and really useful, is adding the “Open Terminal Here” in the same context menu. The package is “gnome-terminal-nautilus”:
$ sudo dnf install gnome-terminal-nautilus
and restarting nautilus as above to take effect immediately.
A last tweak to nautilus, is to open Preferences and check the “Sort folders before files”, so it groups all folders before any files are listed.
Gnome
Dash-to-panel
This extension to gnome-shell is growing on me since I installed it a week ago. From its github page: “An icon taskbar for the Gnome Shell. This extension moves the dash into the gnome main panel so that the application launchers and system tray are combined into a single panel, similar to that found in KDE Plasma and Windows 7+. A separate dock is no longer needed for easy access to running and favorited applications.”
Github’s site of dash-to-panel
To install, we’ll clone it somewhere and then link (or copy) it from where gnome-shell expects it:
$ git clone https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel
$ ln -s dash-to-panel ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
It’s certainly worth trying. The workspace looks cleaner with all icons, menus, etc. grouped at the bottom of the screen. There’s too many configuration options to describe. A really nice addition to the Gnome desktop.
Gnome-tweaks
This application is a must-have and should be installed by default along Gnome 3. You can use it to tweak several options regarding the desktop behavior, appearance, extensions, fonts, etc. To install:
$ sudo dnf install gnome-tweaks
Java
Fedora comes with Java installed but without the GUI packages, and trying to run a program that uses them would throw a “Java headless exception”. To install the full Java package:
$ sudo dnf install java-1.8.0-openjdk