Fedora 39 Looks To Use DNF5 By Default For Better Performance & Improved User Experience

[Jedibeeftrix]

been rumblings for a while now in opensuse of replacing zypper with DNF, wonder if the arrival of DNF5 is moment they're waiting for.

[maage]

I really hope they get unified cache implemented. I have disabled packagekit because I see no point downloading and storing everything twice. It was also very baffling to realize there was two caches of packages and relevant metadata. I don't use microdnf.

[Anvil]

been rumblings for a while now in opensuse of replacing zypper with DNF, wonder if the arrival of DNF5 is moment they're waiting for.

technically i dont think they can replace Opensuse with DNF5, by buyout agreement they have to stay with the current Package Manager, that would of been the terms of when they bought OpenSuse

[hamishmb]

What you're probably finding slow is the constant checking for updated metadata.

I do hope though that the solver could be faster. The developers of (php) composer copied it as their solver and it used to take up to 2GB of memory. Right now they are down to under 100MB for most transactions. I dont know if that is features that already exist in libsolv (if that is still being used) or not, but using less memory and time there would be a big win.

Oh wow that's some Windows Update-level madness there.

The metadata updates are slow yeah, but also it just seems like the time taken on each package is a lot longer. Granted, DNF does more safety checks than APT, so you win some you lose some?

[jorgepl]

In terms of speed and resource consumption, how is DNF vs APT?

[Delgarde]

I really hope they get unified cache implemented. I have disabled packagekit because I see no point downloading and storing everything twice. It was also very baffling to realize there was two caches of packages and relevant metadata. I don't use microdnf.

Indeed... I understand the reasons for the current non-unified system, but it really is a pain in the ass.

As for microdnf, it's mostly used in containers, where you want the base OS image to be as small as possible, while still allowing extra packages to be installed if needed. Given that it's main differentiator is that it doesn't require Python (i.e. one less thing for the base image), I'm not sure if it will still be relevant if DNF is also going down that route.

[birdie]

will DNF5 use less RAM than DNF4 ?

Absolutely. It's written in C++ vs Python. Should be a lot faster as well.

[Vistaus]

been rumblings for a while now in opensuse of replacing zypper with DNF, wonder if the arrival of DNF5 is moment they're waiting for.

What's wrong with Zypper? I really like the way it works. Not saying DNF isn't good (I have no experience with it), but I don't see the need to replace it.

[gbcox]

What you're probably finding slow is the constant checking for updated metadata.

I believe you can adjust the checking of metadata in the dnf.conf if the default setting bothers you... although, you may not be getting the most current updates. Of course it would be nice if it were quicker, but at least for me the benefits of DNF far outweigh the few extra seconds/minutes for the metadata check. Actually, I've switched to using dnf offline-upgrade download and dnf offline-upgrade reboot so never really notice it anyway.

[AdamW]

will DNF5 use less RAM than DNF4 ?

Yes it will. This is one of the major benefits.