# Fedora Workstation Third Party Software Repository Experience

## Initial Setup

Initial setup used to have a step to enable third party repos, but it hasn't worked for some time. Upstream issues with background: [#59](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/59), [#3](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/3).

Currently there's no step in initial setup to enable the third party repos.

Latest mockups for what the 3rd party repos step could look like:


## Info Bar

When you start GNOME Software for the first time you see an Info Bar:


The "Find out more..." link goes to [Workstation/Third Party Software Repositories](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Third_Party_Software_Repositories) on the Fedora Wiki.

- The wiki page is out of date, fairly technical, and not written with an end user audience in mind.
- We've had at least one issue in the past with the wiki page being removed; there's a ticket about moving the content somewhere more stable ([#215](https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/215)).

The info bar will also appear on subsequent trips to GNOME Software until you either Click "Enable" or click the X. Once you've interacted with the info bar, you'll never see it again.

Clicking Enable installs the `fedora-workstation-repositories` package, which contains repositories for Google Chrome, PyCharm, NVIDIA drivers (via rpmfusion), Stream (via RPM Fusion), but does not enable the repositories.

## Behavior with disabled repositories

The third-party repositories ship with `enabled_metadata=1`, so they are theoretically available for search in GNOME Software (but not via DNF). This actually works for Google Chrome because we ship `/usr/share/app-info/xmls/google-chrome.xml` in the `appstream-data` package.


(unknown why the icon is missing - the appdata file has a working remote URL for it. Perhaps GNOME Software doesn't support icon URLs?)

It does not work for PyCharm or Steam because we have no appdata for them. In fact these also don't show up in GNOME Software even if the repository is enabled!

## Repositories Dialog

When the `fedora-workstation-repositories` package *is not* installed, the top of the "Software Repositories" dialog looks like:


When the `fedora-workstation-repositories` package *is* installed, the top of the "Software Repositories" dialog looks like:


There's an outstanding ticket to redesign the repositories dialog in Software: [#1166](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/1166).