Gnome Software does not recognize RPM packages

This is on a reasonably fresh installation of Fedora 42 Workstation. I did not use Gnome Software for a few days, so I cannot tell if the issue persisted from the beginning or only developed later.

At one point I tried to check for updates via Gnome Software and it only gave me Flathub updates. I then tried running dnf upgrade and as expected, there were quite a few. Then I tried to search for apps that certainly have native rpm versions, and only the Flathub version showed up in Software.

The only changes I made were that I disabled the Fedora Flatpak remotes, enabled Flathub and changed the packaging-format-preference dconf key to [‘flatpak:flathub’, ‘rpm’]. These are things I do on every fresh install and until now I had no problems with it.

A user apparently had the same problem here: (F42) Gnome software only shows flatpaks, but their fix (reinstalling Gnome Software) did not work for me.

Hi and welcome to :fedora: !

To narrow down the issue, does it work if you reset the modified dconf key?

Hi Mike,

Unfortunately no. I did a dconf reset -f /org/gnome/software then killed the process/daemon and relaunched it. The situation is still the same, aside from the installed RPMs, it can only see Flatpaks.

Can you post the output of gsettings get org.gnome.software packaging-format-preference and dnf repolist?

[‘flatpak:fedora-testing’, ‘flatpak:fedora’, ‘rpm’]

repo id repo name
code Visual Studio Code
Dropbox Dropbox Repository
fedora Fedora 42 - x86_64
fedora-cisco-openh264 Fedora 42 openh264 (From Cisco) - x86_64
updates Fedora 42 - x86_64 - Updates

Unfortunately I don’t have an F42 machine at hand, to try to reproduce it, but someone being on F42 Workstation might join in.

Can you make sure you’re system is up to date (so that it’s not an issue already fixed)? Performed obviously with sudo dnf upgrade --refresh from the terminal, and not using GNOME Software.

Yes, it is up-to-date.

Check if the issue persists after relabeling:
50.2.2. Relabeling a File System | Red Hat Product Documentation

Also check if this Common Issue also applies to your setup:

Unfortunately yes, relabeling did not help.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely to be this issue because the directory /etc/dnf/repos.override.d/ is empty on my system.

I managed to fix this.

For some reason, every time I use dnf, the dropbox repository throws a 404 error.

Dnf is not phased by this and I can update/install fine. But attempting to do anything with pkcon will fail because apparently packagekit will crap out when any repo cannot be reached.
Screenshot From 2025-04-16 16-36-23

Since Software uses packagekit under the hood, this caused any query to fail silently. I have removed the dropbox repo (which got added automatically after I installed the rpm package from Dropbox directly, I don’t use rpmfusion), and now Gnome Software works fine.

Edit:

For some reason the second image doesn’t open in full size, so is probably unreadable. Anyways, it just shows that when I try to pkcon install okular, it craps out because it cannot refresh the dropbox repo.

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