Fedora 44 Post Install Guide: RPM Fusion, NVIDIA and Codecs in One README

Who this Fedora 44 checklist is for

This is a post-installation checklist for Fedora 44, written as a README and nothing else. The repository has one top-level entry, README.md. There is no script, no package, no configuration file to install. You read it in a browser and paste commands into a terminal.

The target reader is someone who has just finished a Fedora 44 install and wants the usual extras: non-free RPM packages, firmware updates, Flathub, AppImage support, NVIDIA drivers, multimedia codecs and hardware video decoding. The topics listed on the repository (battery, gnome, laptop, nvidia, media-codecs, hw-video) describe that audience fairly precisely. It is a general desktop and laptop guide, not a server hardening document and not a distribution build recipe.

The guide is opinionated in one place: it advises enabling RPM Fusion as a general rule of thumb, on the grounds that Fedora disables repositories for many free and non-free .rpm packages by default and that Steam, Discord and some multimedia codecs live there. That is a real trade-off, and the README states it rather than hiding it. If you deliberately chose Fedora for its default repository policy, this guide is arguing against your choice from the first section.

How the guide is organised and what it actually changes

The README is a linear sequence of tasks. RPM Fusion first, because later sections depend on it. Then a full system update, then firmware through lvfs, then Flatpak, then AppImage, then NVIDIA, then codecs, then VA-API and OpenH264. Order matters here: the multimedia group install and the ffmpeg swap assume RPM Fusion is already enabled, and the NVIDIA section tells you to update and reboot before touching the driver packages.

The mechanism throughout is dnf, plus fwupdmgr and flatpak for their respective areas. Two sections use dnf4 explicitly rather than dnf. The app-stream metadata step lists both `sudo dnf group upgrade core` and `sudo dnf4 group install core`, and the multimedia section uses `sudo dnf4 group install multimedia` with exclusions for libheif-freeworld and obs-studio-freeworld, which the README describes as currently unavailable or incompatible on Fedora 44. That is the kind of detail a generic guide omits, and it is the main reason to prefer this one over a tutorial written for an earlier release.

The codec section also swaps ffmpeg-free for ffmpeg with --allowerasing, then updates the multimedia group with install_weak_deps disabled and the same exclusions. The H/W video section installs ffmpeg-libs, libva and libva-utils, then branches by GPU vendor: Intel gets a swap to intel-media-driver plus libva-intel-driver, AMD gets mesa-va-drivers-freeworld in both 64-bit and i686 builds. The README notes that Mesa drivers lost h264/h265 support in the Fedora repositories in f38 for legal reasons, which is why the freeworld packages exist.

Installing: RPM Fusion, updates and firmware

There is nothing to install from this repository. You open README.md and run what it lists. The first block enables the free and non-free RPM Fusion release packages for your Fedora version, using the %fedora macro so the URLs resolve to the right release:

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
sudo dnf group upgrade core
sudo dnf4 group install core

The README describes the second and third commands as installing app-stream metadata. After they finish, your enabled repositories include the RPM Fusion free and non-free entries, which is what the codec and NVIDIA sections later rely on.

Next, update the system. The README offers the software center or the terminal, then says to reboot:

sudo dnf -y update

Firmware comes next, and it is the one section that does not use dnf. The README gives a four-command sequence: refresh the metadata forcibly, list devices, fetch available updates, apply them. The comment on get-devices says it lists devices with available updates.

fwupdmgr refresh --force
fwupdmgr get-devices
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update

If fwupdmgr is not present on your system, the README does not say how to install it, which is a small gap given that the rest of the page assumes dnf is enough.

Flatpak, AppImage and the NVIDIA branch

Flatpak is one command. The README frames it as a recovery step for people who missed the Enable Third Party Repositories checkbox on first boot:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

AppImage support needs fuse-libs, and the README suggests Gearlever from Flathub as a manager:

sudo dnf install fuse-libs
flatpak install it.mijorus.gearlever

The NVIDIA section is the longest and the most consequential. It starts by telling you to update and reboot so you are on the latest kernel. Then it splits on Secure Boot, which you check with `mokutil --sb-state`. If Secure Boot is enabled, you install kmodtool, akmods, mokutil and openssl, generate a key with `sudo kmodgenca -a` (adding --force if you see a warning about an existing key pair), import the public key with `sudo mokutil --import /etc/pki/akmods/certs/public_key.der`, set a short password, reboot, and complete enrollment in the blue MOK screen. Only then do you install the driver:

sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
modinfo -F version nvidia

The README says to wait at least five minutes before rebooting so the kernel module can build, and that modinfo returns the driver version once it has, instead of an error. That check is the most useful line on the page. If Secure Boot is disabled, the same three driver commands apply without the key enrollment. The guide also points to a separate Nvidia-Fedora-Guide repository for encrypted disks, so encrypted-disk users are handed off rather than covered.

Where this guide is thin or wrong for you

The battery section is struck through and marked deprecated. The README explains why: Fedora now ships Tuned as the default power profile management daemon, so the old advice to install tlp, mask power-profiles-daemon and run powertop --auto-tune is no longer needed. The edit note redirects readers to the H/W video acceleration section instead. Leaving the dead text in place is a reasonable historical record, but it makes the page longer than it needs to be, and a reader skimming for battery advice will hit strikethrough before they hit the explanation.

The bigger limitation is scope. The repository contains only README.md. There is no shell script, so nothing is idempotent and nothing is logged. If a command fails halfway through the multimedia group install, you are re-reading the page to work out where you stopped. There is also no documented rollback. The README does not say how to undo the ffmpeg swap, the media driver swaps, or the RPM Fusion repository installation, and dnf history undo is not mentioned. If you are managing a machine you cannot easily reinstall, that absence matters.

KDE users are not addressed. The related searches include a Fedora 44 KDE post install guide, but this README assumes GNOME in the places where it assumes anything: the software center, GNOME Shell topics, and the Firefox OpenH264 instructions. Several steps (Flatpak, RPM Fusion, firmware, NVIDIA) apply regardless of desktop, but the framing does not. There is also no upgrade path from Fedora 43 here; the guide starts after Fedora 44 is already installed.

An alternative: a post-install script instead of a README

The obvious alternative approach is a scripted post-install, where the same steps are wrapped in a shell script with checks and logging rather than a page of commands to paste. The difference is not cosmetic. A script can test whether RPM Fusion is already enabled before adding it, skip the ffmpeg swap if ffmpeg is already installed, and record what it changed so you can reverse it. This repository makes the opposite choice: it stays as prose and code blocks, which means a human reads each step and decides whether to run it.

That choice has real advantages. The NVIDIA section branches on Secure Boot and requires an interactive MOK enrollment with a password you choose, which is awkward to automate safely. The README also marks packages as unavailable or incompatible on Fedora 44 rather than blindly installing them, and a script would need to keep that exclusion list current. If you want a script, look for one that is maintained against Fedora 44 specifically; if you want to understand each change before it happens, a README is the better format. Just do not expect this one to be both.

Maintenance, licence and what the repository does not state

The last push to the default branch was on 2026-09-23, days before this writing, so the page is current for Fedora 44. The repository is not archived. There are no releases, and the README does not carry a version number or a changelog, so the only signal that the guide has been updated for a new Fedora release is the commit history on main.

No licence file appears in the repository listing. The only top-level entry is README.md, and the README itself does not state a licence. That matters if you intend to copy the text or the command list into your own documentation, because there is no stated permission to do so. It does not affect running the commands on your own machine. Nothing here is legal advice; if reuse matters to you, ask the maintainer.

The upgrade cost is low but not zero. Fedora releases every six months, and several commands are tied to the release in ways that break quietly: the RPM Fusion URLs use the %fedora macro so they follow the version, but the exclusion list for libheif-freeworld and obs-studio-freeworld and the dnf4 versus dnf split are Fedora 44 specifics that will need review at Fedora 45.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this guide if you have just installed Fedora 44 on a laptop or desktop and want one page of copy-paste commands for RPM Fusion, firmware, Flatpak, AppImage, NVIDIA and codecs. Skip it if you need an unattended script, a KDE-specific walkthrough, or anything resembling a rollback path: the repository holds only a README, and it does not document undoing the dnf swaps. Before running the NVIDIA section, check mokutil --sb-state and decide whether you will enroll an akmods key, because the guide splits into two branches at that point and the Secure Boot branch requires a reboot and a password you set yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. devangshekhawat/Fedora-44-Post-Install-Guide on GitHub
2. Issues
3. README