none of the downloaded softwares work in fedora 20

edit

DO NOT PERFORM DAILY COMPUTING ACTIVITIES AS ROOT!

I could swear I just gave this same answer yesterday. Oh wait, I did :-P

Andy, as Cobra said, there are specific repositories for these kinds of programs. You can find them quite easily, but the optimal way of implementing the repos and downloading the desired software is to manually add the repos to /etc/yum.repos.d/[repo-name]. Follow this guide for Google Chrome:

http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-google-chrome-with-yum-on-fedora-red-hat-rhel/

Also:

DO NOT PERFORM DAILY COMPUTING ACTIVITIES AS ROOT! You will need the root account to edit your /etc/yum.repos.d/, but aside from that, unless performing heavy-duty system maintenance or some kind of server administration, there is no need for the root account. Hopefully you set up an admin user during the install process....

Hope this helps!

-Mark

Don't install these packages individually, install them from their respective repositories. Go here:

http://chrome.google.com

and install the YUM repository for google, then use the command line to install the package with

yum install chrome

To get VLC you need a different repository. Go here:

http://rpmfusion.org

and follow the instructions to install both the free and the non-free repositories, then from the command line tell it to install vlc:

yum install vlc

You should never log-in as root user to do usual tasks. Chrome message you mention clearly discourages you to do so (and VLC also says the same). Create another (administrator user), using appropriate tools of your desktop environment, then log-in with this user.