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

With Fedora 39 next autumn it will likely replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 should improve the user experience and deliver better performance for dealing with software management on Fedora Linux.

The change proposal still needs to be signed off on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but given Red Hat's involvement with DNF(5), this will presumably be okay'ed and hopefully all buttoned up in time for completion during the Fedora 39 cycle. The change proposal sums things up as:

The new DNF5 will provide a significant improvement in user experiences and performance. The replacement is the second step in upgrade of Fedora Software Management stack. Without the change there will be multiple software management tool (DNF5, old Microdnf, PackageKit, and DNF) based on different libraries (libdnf, libdnf5), providing a different behavior, and not sharing a history. We can also expect that DNF will have only limited support from upstream. The DNF5 development was announced on Fedora-Devel list in 2020.

DNF5 does away with the Python code to yield a smaller system, faster performance, and to replace the existing DNF and microdnf tooling. DNF5 also unifies the software management stack behavior, introduces a new daemon as an alternative to PackageKit for RPMs, and should perform much better. Faster performance can be expected around querying of repositories, advisory operations, RPM queries, and metadata sharing.

Those wishing to learn more about the tentative plans for DNF5 in Fedora 39 can see the change proposal on the Fedora Wiki as an exciting innovation to look forward to in 2023.