I am switching one machine — the oldest and most vulnerable to breakage — to fedora from Arch for a few reasons.

Fedora uses diff files for updates, and that cuts down the bandwidth. Arch, like debian, does not.

Fedora supports Rkward better than Arch does. At least at present.

AUR (in Arch) seems broken. Again.

And I need a little more stability in OS for the second half of the year. So I installed the beta version of Fedora 26

That is the vanilla version.

The first thing I did was update it. I don’t like using graphic interfaces if I can use a command line for such.

sudo dnf update

The next thing I did was install a different user interface. Fedora 26 comes with gnome: I don’t like gnome. I like lxqt. Other midweight options to consider are budgie or mate: If you want to go more heavy I suggest cinnamon.

But I know I use lxqt most of the time, so to keep it simple I installed only one alternative.

 sudo dnf groupinstall lxqt 

Reboot, and then select (look at the asterisk when you log in) lxqt. It is fairly pretty. At this point I want to install things that I prefer to use.

I prefer brave to firefox.

sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brave-rpm-release/x86_64/
sudo rpm --import https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/brave-rpm-release/keys.asc
sudo dnf install brave

And I like having spotify up.

 sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-spotify.repo
sudo dnf install spotify

And I want a rkward up, along with darktable. If you don’t need rkward, installing R first makes things a bit clearer, and is fairly easy. You do need a fair amount of room for either: these are big programmes with extensive dependencies.

 sudo dnf install R-core
sudo dnf install rkward

Finally, I added hugin, a panorama maker, while installing darktable, which is an open source lightroon clone with better tools. As I dislike evolution as a mail handler, I installed thunderbird.

 sudo dnf install darktable hugin
sudo dnf install thunderbird

Brave manages videos well. Brave is now defaulted.

Let’s see how much work I can get done with this stack.