Fedora 33 system updates

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1

hello

how do you update your system?

I have read in several forums that the gnome software is faulty but it is more secure than with dnf in the normal console.

one wrote officially one should do it via tty.

2

Personally, I use dnf in a terminal.

I am not sure why gnome software would be more secure.

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3

If you prefer online upgrade then:

sudo dnf upgrade

Otherwise, you can use offline upgrade.

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4

https://lwn.net/Articles/702629/

I think it is talking about this, which is in the year of 2016. As stated in the article, offline dnf update / upgrade can be run safely inside a Graphical Desktop Environment.

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5

I run “dnf upgrade” in a system console, then reboot.

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6

I agree, it’s a simple method for upgrade. simple, fast, and stable!

7

Yes, and lwn.net is known for running headlines with little substance to support them.

8

I’m using this little script for at least 5 years now without problems.

#!/bin/bash
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# upgrade_to.sh
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------

test "$1" || exit

if [ ! -f ~/cleaned.upgrade ]; then
    journalctl --vacuum-time=1day

    dnf clean all

    test -d /var/cache/yum/ && \
    rm -fr /var/cache/yum/*

    touch ~/cleaned.upgrade
fi

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$1-primary

dnf -y --releasever=$1 update rpmfusion*
dnf -y --releasever=$1 --allowerasing distro-sync || exit

touch /.autorelabel

test -f ~/cleaned.upgrade && rm -f ~/cleaned.upgrade

reboot

This way you could i.e. upgrade from F31 to F33 as long as the gpg-key is present in /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/.

It comes handy if you have multiple instances of to take care of.

Edit:

Ok, seems like I got carried away a little :slight_smile:
This script of course is for upgrading major versions and not simple system updates.

Might be handy for someone anyhow :smiley:

9

I do essentially the same thing from a cron job. Runs every week.

10

While the chance of encountering a problem is relatively low, it’s nonetheless possible and I’ve personally experienced segfaulting apps and services after installing updates, and sometimes even kernel panic when it involves essential components such as glibc.
You have a significantly higher likelihood of implications if you try to perform online upgrade on a high-load server with multiple active services.
Moreover, properly applying updates and especially security updates requires to restart the affected apps and services:

sudo dnf needs-restarting
2 Likes
11

thank you for the answers

There are different opinions on the subject and that irritated me a bit

I asked because I want to install fedora on my second laptop and there are a lot of updates on the first update

12

The divided opinions means the issue is not wide spread.

And, there are multiple ways of doing it with different levels of assurance.

You just need to pick one that is suitable to you.

4 Likes
13

You ask three people and you get four answers - to be expected. There is simply several ways to update and no real right or wrong. In my opinion, any option is fine, however, offline-upgrades (dnf offline-upgrade ... and Gnome Software) are slightly safer than dnf upgrade in Gnome terminal (Gnome Shell may crash and take down your upgrade process somewhere in the middle).

Whatever you choose is fine. I personally just run dnf upgrade, no reboot.

Or just use the netinstall image to install Fedora and it downloads and installs the latest packages, no 2.6G update required after install.

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14

On the package level (i.e. which packages are installed and when) there is no difference as this is actually handled under the hood by libdnf, to which both Gnome Software & dnf are frontends. This means that most of the time, the two behave exactly the same (although they, somewhat annoyingly, maintain separate package caches).

The only difference I can think of is the offline-upgrades feature @augenauf mentioned. dnf upgrade will by default upgrade everything right now, while Gnome Software will by default behave like dnf offline-upgrade download. Personally, I have never had any unanticipated problems with using dnf upgrade.

I think the most important takeaway is that a system sucessfully upgraded using dnf and one successfully upgraded using Gnome Software will never look different.

15 
dnf deplist gnome-software | grep -i -e dnf -e packagekit
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16

Isn’t that true of almost anything with Linux? There is rarely a single right way to do things.

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17

Not the way I do it. When I said “system console”, I am afraid that many do not understand. To be clear, I am not in a terminal running under Gnome or any other DE, I am in runlevel 3 with no DE or window manager running on the system. Some people call this a tty (and it is), but all of the windowing systems are also running in a tty, so that is still not a clear description.

When I managed big UNIX systems, I always installed and upgraded in run level 1 (aka, single-user mode), but that cannot be done when the upgrade software requires network access, as most modern Linuxes do.

This is a good thread.

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18

In >15 years of using fedora, with routine updates, system upgrades, etc, I have never seen once that rpm, then yum, then dnf, have caused a crash or other than expected results. I always do the updates from the cli, with new installs from the gnome terminal and updates run on the base OS with a cron job.

While there is a small risk of error it seems so low that I am willing to accept it and continue on as I have been. I am not willing to revert back to a bare tty in run level 1 or 3 just to do updates that often come several times a week.

To each according to the risk they are willing to shoulder.

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19

i have read everything and decided on a method. I want to thank everyone :smiley:

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20

sudo dnf update

1 Like