hello, I recently decided to switch to Fedora. In the past, I was using Arch. I myself am not a very tech person (please don’t ask me why I was using Arch haha, let’s just say I felt like it), but at some point I talked to some experienced people, and they told me that installing packages on Arch or updating Arch though gui software centers is not recommended; it’s only recommended for searching for packages while installing then through cli; the reason for that being that most software centers are built on libalpm and not pacman, so it might create issues and bugs sometimes.
so, my question is… are there any concerns like that on Fedora? Are dnf/rpm friends with libalpm? Now that I’m installing this system, can I forget about all of it and just use the gnome software center for package management and updates without worrying? Or any other gui tool, if Fedora has one (I’m still yet to install, so I wouldn’t know yet)
I doubt it. I mean, things like gnome software are not tied to any distro, right? Wouldn’t they be built on the same backend, regardless of the system?
thanks; the command for daily updates is just sudo dnf upgrade, right?
This is similar on Fedora since GNOME Software depends on PackageKit and Flatpak.
PackageKit has its own data, cache, timer, transaction history separate from DNF and does not respect certain DNF settings like version locks, exclusions, etc.
libalpm is a package management library, primarily used by pacman. For ease of access, the libalpm manual has been split up into several sections.
An interesting article about PackageKit:
Backends of PackageKit:
Back-ends
A number of different package management systems (known as back-ends) support different abstract methods and signals used by the front-end tools.[9] Supported back-ends include:
I guess this way is better to understand how PackageKit works with the back-ends together to serve the different distributions and their package management tools.
PackageKit tends to use rpm directly for many operations instead of doing everything through dnf. That is different from the pacman or zypper backend used by some other distros. Also, dnf is a moving target going from yum to dnf to dnf3 to dnf4.
Becuase it’s optional I guess.
I do not update by machines BIOS unless I know that it fixes womething for example.
I would not like a upgrade from f40 to f41 to force fireware updates on me.
I don’t know, I always thought that firmware updates are something very important in terms of security, so I would’ve thought they would be included even in daily updates, let alone version updates
Of course it is important. As every product as a computer has his live span, so also the firmware for it. If the hardware gets older there is no new firmware available anymore. So, as long as you have a computer where is not so old use the Gui to make the firmware updates. With Gnome it is PackageKit alias Gnome-software while other DE’s use other tools. Please have a look on the links above I posted and have a read about it.
I sort of skipped it because, as a non-tech person, I never feel confident in really understanding things like that. It’s difficult to process, and I don’t exactly have much prior knowledge that would help me on that. So… I sort of just hope that, if there’s anything important to do, smart people will tell me about it, haha. In this case, I’ll probably be using fwupdmgr to manage my firmware updates.
although I doubt that dnf doesn’t handle firmware updates, because after performing a full system update through dnf, I checked updates in gnome software, and there was nothing to find - no firmware updates either, which I suppose would still be yet to install, if dnf didn’t handle them. But it could also be that I just kept firmware updates that were installed while using my previous Linux systems. In case they even stay after changing systems. I don’t know. When I looked at the interface of my BIOS (after the firmware updates), it still said that my firmware version is from 2015 (for reference, my laptop was purchased in 2018, so back then it wasn’t that old). Speaking of, I really hope that my hardware and firmware are not unsupported by now. But I have no clue.
I don’t know, I always thought that firmware updates are something very important in terms of security, so I would’ve thought they would be included even in daily updates, let alone version updates