A couple of weeks ago, I upgraded a Fedora 33 to 35 using the normal upgrade process, and this went fine. I’ve done this procedure several times on multiple PC’s, and it’s just brilliant how well the upgrade works. However, from that time, when I clicked the package update popups, Discover opened instead of the until then usual tiny system tray thing, which would only show the package names that would be updated.
Yesterday, Discover wanted to “upgrade” my Fedora 35 to… 35 for the umpteenth time. This was suspicious, since I was already at 35. However, since Discover kept asking, I thought, “well, let’s go for it”. That was the wrong choice. After updating and rebooting, Fedora showed a distorted login screen telling me it could not load some .so file (sorry, I didn’t take any pics, and I don’t remember the exact message), but I could still type the password. After I typed the password, hoping to fix the problem when logged in, the system would just freeze and respond to nothing. To shorten the story, in the end, I had to reinstall Fedora from scratch.
To me, Discover is a piece of software that is slow to start and use, has too many bells and whistles to simply update packages for which an update is available (the old way was fine; there are other ways to notify a user that a reboot after updates is needed), and since it completely broke my Fedora I find it plain dangerous. Unless I really have to, I will not use Discover again: I hate having to reinstall Fedora when it wasn’t needed in the first place.
I think Fedora is mostly used as a desktop OS. I do on several PCs for quite some time now. But as much as you think you backed up every config file there is (not everything is in the user profile, which is on a separate volume, so yes, I salvaged that), you’ll always miss something, and it takes a lot of time to get to the same spot as before Discover broke things.
Although it looks like it, I do not want to rant; instead, I wanted to inform about what happened and what shouldn’t have happened. Converting this into a question/request: please fix Discover, so it doesn’t break the OS. Running “dnf update” usually doesn’t, so why should Discover?
But without kidding, I didn’t do any of that because I didn’t expect things to break like this, so I have to dig from memory. And memory says that it actually wanted to upgrade, which really surprised me. It for sure wanted to install a lot of F35 labeled packages, which were or should already have been installed. But I can’t be of help more than this, which I realize is no help at all, because I don’t have any hard evidence to show.