Fedora 43 for Rails: Quickstart to a Rails‑Ready Dev Machine

This short guide helps you get a Fedora 43 workstation ready for Rails development. It covers updating your system, enabling repositories needed by AppImages and other third‑party software, and installing a minimal developer toolchain (Ruby support, build tools, PostgreSQL headers, Docker) plus a few useful CLI apps and GNOME extensions so you can start building Rails apps quickly.

Why Fedora?

• Fedora has struck a nice balance between good defaults, reasonably updated library as well as stability.

• It lets you be on the cutting edge as much as you want which can be a lot or nothing, that's up-to you.

Why this specific setup?

• I like a certain mix of fonts, themes and apps to feel fully productive. This list is present only to act as an inspiration and a reminder for me :D

Run and Install updates

sudo dnf update -y

Enable Terra repo for access to wide variety of packages

sudo dnf install --nogpgcheck --repofrompath 'terra,https://repos.fyralabs.com/terra$releasever' terra-release

Add packages required for AppImages

https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageKit/wiki/FUSE

Gnome Extensions

Install the gnome-browser-connector to install extensions directly from extensions.gnome.org

sudo dnf install gnome-browser-connector

Brightness Control using DDCUtil

Automatic Theme Switcher

Must Have Apps:

• LocalSend

• Bazaar - Flathub AppStore

• Ghostty - Terminal Replacement

• Vicinae - Inspired from Raycast brings superior search to Linux

• Yaak/Bruno - Postman alternative

• Obsidian

• 1Password

Terminal Setup

Install Zsh and change shell to Zsh

sudo dnf install -y zsh
grep username /etc/passwd
chsh -s $(which zsh)
grep username /etc/passwd

CLI Apps:

• Neovim

  • sudo dnf install -y neovim python3-neovim

• Zoxide: cd command on steroids

• Atuin CLI - command history search on steroids

• starship

• ripgrep

• fzf

• mise

  • sudo dnf copr enable jdxcode/mise
sudo dnf install mise

• jq

• delta - git pager (https://dandavison.github.io/delta/installation.html)

Software Development Tools:

• Claude Code

• Zed

• OpenCode

• Codex

Firefox extensions:

• Always Right

Ricing Gnome:

Gnome Shell Themes:

• Flat Remix Dark

• Marble Shell

Icon Themes:

• Papirus Icons

• Kora

Cursor themes:

• Capitane Cursors