Fedora: Install Third-Party Software And Codecs With Fedy

Fedy Fedora todo after fresh installation

If you've just installed Fedora and you're looking for a quick way of installing some popular third-party software that's not in the Fedora standard repositories, try Fedy. The application is somewhat similar to Ninite, a tool to install popular applications on Windows, but for Fedora.

Fedy is an application for Fedora that lets you install codecs, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, and applications like Steam, Spotify, Google Chrome, Skype, Slack, WPS Office, and many others, with a button click. The application can also install some development tools (Atom, Android Studio, Eclipse IDE, Oracle JDK, etc.), Gtk and icon themes, and even perform some tweaks like disabling mouse acceleration, improve font rendering, or add colors to the Bash prompt.

Thanks to this, you can quickly install the software you use frequently after a fresh Fedora installation, without having to download each software manually, wait for a package to install and then proceed with the next, and so on.

Fedy uses a Gtk3 user interface that displays applications and tweaks by categories, and a search button that lets you easily find an application to install or a tweak to apply. Actions are automatically queued, so you can choose to install multiple applications without having to wait for each to finish. Also, it's possible to undo actions performed using Fedy.

For installing new software or tweaking the system, Fedy uses a plugin system, with each plugin consisting of a metadata.json file and an optional install.sh script. Thanks to this, it's very easy to further extend Fedy to suit your needs, or to contribute to the upstream development with new plugins.

Fedy can install the following software on Fedora:

Apps: Brave Browser, Dino, Dropbox Nautilus plugin, Firefox Developer Edition, Google Chrome, Google Play Music Desktop Player, HandBrake, Lutris (which is now in the Fedora 29 standard repositories, so I guess it shouldn't be in Fedy any more), Master PDF Editor, Mixxx DJ Software, Only Office, Opera, PeaZip, Plex Media Player, Popcorn Time, Quilter, Rambox, Resilio Sync, Signal Desktop, Simplenote, Skype, Slak, Spotify, Steam, Syncthing, TeamViewer, Telegram, Viber, VirtualBox, VirtualBox guest additions, Vivaldi, WPS Office, Zoom
Development Tools: Android Studio, Arduino IDE, Atom, CLion, Eclipse IDE (for C/C++, Java, PHP, etc.), GNOME development tools, GitKraken, ItelliJ Idea Community and Ultimate editions, JetBrains Toolbox App, LightTable, Oracle JDK, PhpStorm, Postman, PyCharm Community or Professional editions, RStudio, RubyMine, SmartGit, Sublime Text 3, Visual Studio Code, WebStorm, Yatta Eclipse Launcher, wxHexEditor
Themes: Adapta Gtk+ theme, Arc Gtk+ and icon themes, EvoPop Gtk+ and icon themes, Flat-Remix, Moka icon theme, Numix Gtk+ and icon theme, Paper Gtk+ and icon themes, Papirus icon theme
Utilities: Adobe Flash (npapi and ppapi), support for more archive formats, encrypted DVD playback (libdvdcss), Microsoft TrueType core fonts, multimedia codecs to encode or decode audio or video streams, Oracle JRE, Gtk+ theme engines

On top of that, Fedy can also tweak Fedora:

Improve font rendering
Delete junk files
Disable mouse acceleration
Add a fancy Bash prompt
Run the Grub2 configuration scripts and update the configuration file
Set SELinux to permissive mode
Enable system-wide touchpad tap-to-click

It should be noted that for software that's available in a third party repository for Fedora, like Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text 3, Fedy adds the repository so you receive updates when new versions are released, directly from the developer. Also, some software installable through Fedy, like Google Chrome, automatically adds its own repository on installation. As a side note, the Atom repository is not added, even though there is one for Fedora.

You might like: Fedora Updates Chromium With VAAPI Support, Here's How To Enable Hardware-Accelerated Video Decoding

Install Fedy on Fedora

To install Fedy, the first step is to install the RPMFusion repositories (it's a single line):

sudo dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Now you can then add the Fedy Copr repository and install the app on Fedora 31, 30 or 29 using:

sudo dnf copr enable kwizart/fedy

sudo dnf install fedy

Fedy will now show up in your applications menu so launch it and start installing your favorite software that's not in the Fedora standard repositories.