Atomic Desktops

On Silverblue, Kinoite and the other atomic variants, dnf is not the tool; rpm-ostree layers packages onto the base image, and every change costs a reboot, slows every subsequent update, and is one more thing that can block a rebase. That is why the usual answer on atomic is Flatpak-first: install VLC, mpv, Firefox and the rest from Flathub and let their runtimes bring their own codecs, which sidesteps this entire page.

If you do want the host stack layered, layer the RPM Fusion release packages first and reboot — see Third-Party Repositories.

The FFmpeg swap has no rpm-ostree equivalent, so it is expressed as an override that removes the whole -free family and installs the replacement in one transaction:

sudo rpm-ostree override remove \
  ffmpeg-free libavcodec-free libavdevice-free libavfilter-free \
  libavformat-free libavutil-free libpostproc-free libswresample-free \
  libswscale-free fdk-aac-free \
  --install ffmpeg

The hardware driver packages layer normally — mesa-va-drivers-freeworld, intel-media-driver or libva-nvidia-driver, same choice as above.

One atomic-specific trap: at a major release upgrade the RPM Fusion release packages have to be replaced in the same transaction as the rebase — see Third-Party Repositories.