I’ll try to describe the issue the best I can. I’m using the KDE spin and noticed that discover takes a long time to do query related tasks (checking for updates and even searching to a lesser extent).
The command line is pretty quick, probably due to config tweaks that make dnf choose the fastest mirror and increase max parallel downloads. Of course, I can use the command line to update, so it is more of a quality of life issue, but I would appreciate any help on the matter.
The issue is most noticeable when checking for updates, since it sometimes takes minutes to check for updates.
If any additional information is required, please let me know, and I’ll provide it.
The short of it is that Discover is doing more than just rpm, but also flatpak against probably multiple sources (if you have third party software enabled). dnf regularly updates its cache in the background, but if you’ve just logged into KDE and immediately start Discover, it hasn’t had the opportunity to update its own cache yet, and depending on how many 3rd party repos you’ve enabled and how long since your last login, it could take a little while to get you fresh, updated information, which is necessary in order to inform you about available updates and installable software. The same is also true (more or less) for Gnome Software for Gnome users.
You can certainly use dnf or flatpak directly to install things, as well, but it makes sense that Discover might initially take longer to load, since it’s being asked to do more things and might have more work to do to get there.
I think I get it, but it still takes much longer than a script I made that updates both flatpak and dnf. The script can certainly take a while but it often finishes the entire update process before Discover checks for updates. Anyway, if there is something I can do awesome, but if not, its fine since the command line still works fine.
I don’t have any advice other than, I was running Kinoite recently on some 8 year old hardware and found it to also be terribly slow while CLI updates are usable. My solution was to run it on new hardware and Discover runs quickly for me now. It seems that Discover is more resource intensive and that impacts performance on older hardware. Conversely, I’m able to successfully run Gnome Software on my Raspberry Pi400.
I decided to install gnome software. It doesn’t seem to do things any quicker but it at least can update in the background so I don’t have to worry about it.
The reason is most likely packagekit, I also experience slow Discover updating time. Using pkmon turns out that packagekit keeps getting stuck refreshing its cache and making discover wait. So I removed packagekit and set dnf-automatic. Now discover runs much faster but only for Flatpak packages.