New to Linux – A Few Questions and Concerns

Ask Fedora
1

Hello everyone,

I recently installed Fedora 44 and I’m completely new to the Linux world. I’ve been using Windows for almost 20 years and knew it inside out, so all of this is very new to me. Please don’t hold it against me if I ask something obvious, and sorry in advance—I know you probably hear these kinds of questions all the time, but I’m not sure who else to ask.

I’ve spent a lot of time Googling and watching YouTube videos, but many things are still unclear to me.

So, I installed Fedora 44 KDE, and honestly, I don’t know what I should do after installation or what the usual Linux setup process looks like. On Windows, I have a routine: install chipset drivers, GPU drivers, audio drivers, and that’s basically it.

After installing Fedora 44 KDE, I found several guides online and followed these steps:

  1. RPM Fusion setup:
    Making sure you're not a bot!

I installed the Free and Nonfree repositories and also ran:

sudo dnf config-manager setopt fedora-cisco-openh264.enabled=1
  1. Multimedia setup:
    Making sure you're not a bot!

I ran:

sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing

sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin

I also installed:

sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld

sudo dnf install mesa-va-drivers-freeworld.i686

My main question is: did I do everything correctly, and is this the recommended setup?

What worries me the most is the Mesa Freeworld packages. By installing mesa-va-drivers-freeworld and the i686 version, did I replace Fedora’s default Mesa drivers, or are these just additional packages and everything is fine?

  1. In KDE Info Center, under Sensors, everything was empty. I installed lm_sensors and answered “yes” to all the prompts during the detection process. Was that the correct thing to do?

Also, I’m still a bit confused about how CPU and GPU monitoring works under Linux.

  1. Firefox performance is much worse than on Windows 11. Scrolling feels very laggy and stuttery, and GPU usage often jumps to 30–50%. I don’t understand why this is happening or how to fix it. Has anyone experienced something similar?

  2. In Discover, when I choose an application and want to install it, I often see multiple sources available:

  • Fedora Linux
  • Fedora Flatpaks
  • Fedora Flatpaks

Which one should I choose, and what are the differences between them?

As a new Linux user, I’m still trying to understand the package ecosystem and the best practices for installing software on Fedora.

Thank you very much in advance for any help and advice.

My hardware:

  • Ryzen 5 2600
  • 16 GB RAM
  • Radeon RX 5500 XT 4 GB
  • Samsung 144 Hz monitor
2

Hi Nik and welcome to Fedora Linux’s support forum.

You did replace Fedora’s drivers and it might create a few transitory problems with system updates later on.[1] But many people consider the trade-off of the (typically momentary) update problems to be worth the benefits of using the proprietary driver.

Part of the problem might just be that you are using a new system that has not cached a lot of the content from sites that you visit frequently. The problem might be being amplified by a slow network connection. Also, sometimes the video drivers do not “just work” with the GPU-accelerated rendering and require some tinkering to get good performance.

There are trade-offs to using Linux. Some people don’t mind learning all the technical odds and ends. But if you want things to work like Windows or macOS, you will be disappointed.

I don’t know the answers to all of your questions. You might want to repost them as separate topics and tag them to get the attention of people who might have more experience with those different applications.

Have fun with your foray into Linux!

  1. ↩︎

3

I’m retired from a “large enterprise” where (Enterprise Windows) was required to read memos from higher pay grades, but our lab moved from SGI IRIX64 to RHEL Linux for batch processing and macOS (for Illustrator and Photoshop to replace the SGI versions). Very few new hires had Linux experience. For windows, if a system wasn’t working properly that was a problem for the IT group. For Linux users had to learn some basic troubleshooting which often required using command-tools, if only because Linux support is a community effort involving people from around the world. Many found the free book from https://LinuxCommand.org helpful. You can spend a few hours practicing basic tasks (creating and modifying text files, etc.) and then refer to the book as needed. There is an art to describing issues in a way that will be found by other users with similar software and hardware who can reproduce an issue.

Many people use Linux because their needs are not well served by Windows. Linux is used on a wide range of hardware, including older systems no longer supported by Windows, macOS or other commercial OS’s. A good principle is to start with the default configuration and only change it when issues are encountered. This helps ensure that other users have similar software, have experienced similar issues, and can offer useful advice.

4

Yes that should be fine.

5

Welcome to Fedora!

Go with what the Fedora distro provides, especially since you don’t have an NVIDIA GPU.
That’s usually the best and most stable outcome.

That’s an (important) question of its own. Please open a separate topic for your questions 1..5.

6

Yes. Fedora with AMD GPU is pretty much good out-of-the-box, no random guides on the net needed. The only exception is the codec stuff that you’ve done as per the RPM Fusion Multimedia guide, since Fedora doesn’t include some of those codecs.

Regarding Firefox being slower on Linux than on Windows, this is not an uncommon complaint. Hard to know what is causing it though. Maybe its hardware acceleration doesn’t like your GPU driver version, e.g. there was some kind of regression. You can try disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox for science, and compare.

You can also try Chrome and see if the experience is better. Chrome does perform better than Firefox in general, though hard to know if the difference will be huge in your specific situation.

7

I had the exact issue on my 10 yrs old machine. The sluggish performance of Firefox is likely caused by the Wayland display server if you are using Plasma KDE, which often struggles to render smoothly. Transitioning away from Wayland to Cinnamon helped a lot with the performance.

8

Firefox should not be running poorly. It is working very smoothly for me on my old Celeron with 4GB RAM.

Welcome to Fedora. There are no stupid questions here. As @augenauf said, it will be best to ask one question per topic.

9

So did I mess something up? Should I just do a clean install of Fedora and leave everything as it is? I installed Steam via RPM Fusion, so I thought I also needed to install those Mesa drivers for hardware codecs with AMD (Mesa)…

Thanks everyone for the answers.

10

@nik92m Web sites can vary widely in resource demands, so it would be useful if you can provide a few problematic URL’s. Some sites use non-free video encodings that require RPMfusion packages. Other programs running in background may affect Firefox performance.

11

It looks like you did a fantastic job of installing things. RPM tends to offer better packages, but when major upgrades occur, they can go out of sync with Fedora repos for maybe a week or possibly two. Though usually it is only a few days.

How is your system running now?

12

A problem for some is that Firefox enables some AI features and effectively imposes this on users. There are suggestive “AI controls” that can “Block AI”, but “block ai” effectively means only to hide it, not to disable it. There are several issues around this, but the one that is not a matter of discussion is the negative impact on performance.

It might be hardware-dependent how strong this impact is. MAYBE this is the issue the user here experiences: settings and impacts of this among systems can vary, and some systems might also change defaults, while some defaults are changed with updates and others not, making it a difference if a user has a new system with a new installation compared to updates of the earlier one.

That said, advanced users can disable the features in about:config, but its several settings to change

13

No, you didn’t mess anything up. :slightly_smiling_face: Those MESA drivers from RPM Fusion should work. But there are no guarantees. There aren’t really any guarantees that the default ones that ship from Fedora Linux’s native repos will work correctly either. That said, you shouldn’t have to do a complete reinstall if you find that something isn’t working correctly. If you find a software package does not work correctly, you can usually upgrade or downgrade to a different version to work around the problem. As long as you stick with Fedora Linux’s RPMs, the package manager should prevent you from installing anything that is incompatible.

If you do find that some RPM package doesn’t work correctly on Fedora Linux, this forum is a good place to report it. Someone here should be able to help you work around any problem you find with RPM packages. I cannot help you much with the Firefox problem though. I tend to use Google Chrome personally.

14

It works very well :+1:

One more thing guys: if I installed sudo dnf swap ffmpeg-free ffmpeg --allowerasing and sudo dnf update @multimedia --setopt="install_weak_deps=False" --exclude=PackageKit-gstreamer-plugin, do I also need to run and enable sudo dnf config-manager setopt fedora-cisco-openh264.enabled=1, or was that already included with the codecs I installed? I’m mostly asking because of Steam.

15

A problem for some is that Firefox enables some AI features and effectively imposes this on users. There are suggestive “AI controls” that can “Block AI”, but “block ai” effectively means only to hide it, not to disable it.

Do you have actual evidence for that, like a statement from mozilla?

16

Cisco h264 repo is installed and enabled by default, though it will hurt nothing to run that command.

17

I essentially don’t know where to start given how much there is around about this.

So I restrict myself to the most simple and reproducible facts. First, the formulations of the official documentations that carefully emphasizes on block = “you will no longer see” definitions.

When you use the Block AI enhancements toggle switch, you won’t see new or current AI features in Firefox. You also won’t see pop-ups promoting them.

(You will find comparable formulations in your “AI control”.

Second, check out your AI settings in about:config when you have your AI “blocked”:
to sum up what a contributor in the Mozilla forums stated:

there isn’t a simple toggle to permanently disable machine learning features in Firefox, but you can adjust settings in about config to turn them off

When you check your *.ai* and *.ml.* settings after using the “block ai”, differentiate between settings that disable AI/ML and settings that just disable some ML-related windows and such.

That said, off the cuff, I didn’t find a Mozilla statement other than “block=you-don’t-see” while Mozilla moderators insist that no data leaves the machine if not approved by the user but they leave other parts of queries open, while others, incl. contributors confirming the statement that ai is not disabled by the “ai control”, are left without comments by their Mods. These are just cherry picks of mine and should be taken carefully. You will find much more on reddit, ycombinator etc, but also articles etc. Again, the apparent issue is intransparency and performance issues, everything else is speculation.

Reducing stuff like this to two statements (what I just did) simplifies a lot and might draw a hostile picture of Firefox where it is not clear if that is actually the case: there are many explanations for this that are not hostile, incl. for the other issues related to this (search for yourself), which is why I indicated that this is all a matter of debate, and the only thing that actually is not (with regards to this case) is the performance impact. What might be added to be not a matter of debate is intransparency of Firefox’s current approach, that leaves to a lot of speculations and a sea of possibilities and explanations.

Since some people might check out this sea of speculations (imho provoked by Mozilla → intransparency) with a lot of people posting to think to know what is going on (not seldomly based on biases as there is no alternative source): keep in mind to be careful with derivations, as especially the legal updates that are often criticized do not automatically imply that any data is leaving your machine, whereas some statements you will find try to derive this. Again, it’s intransparency that Mozilla can be “accused” of: moderators of Mozilla (e.g. here) confirm that sending data does not take place without consent, but avoid to answer stuff beyond. Just wanted to add this point to avoid that the related debate enters here too…

I asked our Firefox maintainer, who wants to write an article Firefox/AI, to maybe tackle the current issues too, bringing some light in the sea of possibilities, and make the intransparency some more transparent. We’ll see.

That said, if you want to go ahead with this, please open a new topic, as we are then leaving the on-topic path :classic_smiley: