Hey! I’m wondering what the best way of installing the GNOME desktop onto the F41 KDE spin is. I basically would like it as an additional option on the login screen to test out some things.
Found this article in the Fedora docs describing how it should be done, however there seem to be some problems. - Following the instructions there (and correcting for the dnf5 update in F41) I get this list of available desktop environments:
GNOME nowhere to be found. I though maybe the “Basic Desktop” might be it - since it’s the default for Fedora - but that sounds a tad odd.
Also dnf5 seems to show far fewer options, which I thought was interesting xD
[radio@radio-pc ~]$ dnf5 group list --available |grep desktop
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
budgie-desktop Budgie no
budgie-desktop-apps Budgie Desktop Applications no
cosmic-desktop COSMIC Desktop no
cosmic-desktop-apps COSMIC Desktop Supplementary Applications no
desktop-accessibility Desktop accessibility no
kde-desktop KDE no
What would be the typical way to achieve this? Thanks!
Try adding the --hidden flag to your dnf commands. There are a bunch of hidden groups too:
$ sudo dnf group list --hidden | grep -Ei "gnome|workstation"
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
critical-path-gnome Critical Path (GNOME) no
gnome-desktop GNOME no
gnome-games Extra games for the GNOME Desktop no
gnome-software-development GNOME Software Development no
workstation-ostree-support Fedora Workstation ostree support no
workstation-product Fedora Workstation product core no
You really should be using dnf5 (the default) with f41.
Installing the gnome desktop would then be dnf install @gnome-desktop
The biggest problem that you will quickly find is that dnf5 and dnf4 do not share databases nor caches and software installed with dnf4 is unknown to dnf5 (and vice-versa)
Try sudo dnf group list --hidden vs sudo dnf4 group list --hidden to see the differences.
Oh I see, thanks. I didn’t realize there was much of a difference behind the scenes between the two.
I kind of stopped using dnf5 because it kept re-installing the nvidia-gpu-firmware, which was causing problems for me. I should probably give it another go.
Yep. As an AMDGPU user tho it causes issues. Just having it installed creates a 5 minute delay when starting most Steam games for me. - (That was not fun to debug, btw xD)
Removing it is fine as long as you have no nvidia GPUs. It will, however, be reinstalled about once a month with updates when a new linux-firmware release occurs.
This will happen regardless of the version of dnf you are using. (and within the gnome software or discover apps as well).
I am not sure how to prevent a single firmware package from being installed and the system should not be doing anything with firmware that does not apply to the installed hardware
To me it looks like nvidia-gpu-firmware is only included as a “recommends”. That means you should be able to exclude it by creating a excludepkgs= entry in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.
Oh cool, thanks! I tried it and it does indeed seem to exclude the package. At least in my few basic tests. Will have to see what things like Mesa do when updating those.