Thank you for your patience and for the thorough explanation!
I did save the list of removed packages, so I guess I’ll go through and add those back one by one just in case? I’ll try to remember the --noautoremove option for next time.
I ran distro-sync again and then rebooted. It appears to have booted into the fc43 kernel and everything seems right, so I think that’s fixed it for now.
Notice that in dnf5 it changed spelling to --no-autoremove.
So which command fixed it? That is an important piece of information for future users.
Don’t do anything about the kernel until a new kernel is released for Fedora 43, which would be anyday now, if not already. Otherwise things could get messed up in a bad way.
Great point. I tried sudo dnf reinstall libbluray first and that seemed to work, so I did not try the second command.
Well, as I mentioned, I already ran distro-sync again and it seemed to work. I rebooted and now I’m on the fc43 kernel. uname -r returns 6.17.12-300.fc43.x86_64. Everything seems to be working.
What is the risk now that I’ve upgraded the kernel, is there anything I should watch out for? Will my system update to the 6.18 kernel normally or will I need to do something special?
Edit: I just tried sudo dnf update --refresh to see what the output would be, and it includes the installation of the 6.18 kernel and removal of 6.17, in addition to upgrading many other packages. Is it safe to do this?
It depends on how careful you are. Some people has invertently installed the debug kernel version or the uki kernel versions which cause problem with the /boot or /boot/efi to run out of space. Just as an example.
The thing is: there is no real difference between the 42 kernel and 43 kernel, so if you just leave the kernels alone and wait for the new kernel update in version 43, everything would just sort it out automatically without doing anything, except for running the regular updates.
The duplicates, however, do need to be fixed one way or the other.
Having been involved for this entire discussion, it appears that the upgrade using the packagekit service failed in the middle of ugrading the kernel packages and before removing the f42 packages.
Thus he had to do several steps.
He probably could have done steps 1 & 2 in reverse order and avoided the second distro-sync in step 4.
Since the 6.18 kernel is now in the updates repo it should be safe to perform those updates.
Regular updates are necessary to keep your system up to date with the progress in package updates in the repos.
Note that the removal of the kernel is only removing the oldest kernel version you have installed and not all 6.17 kernels. The system by default retains the last 3 kernel versions installed.
Confirming that the update went fine and the latest 6.18 kernel seems to be running without issues. Thanks to all for your assistance!