I have a question regarding the behavior of gnome-software on Fedora 42 Workstation.
I find gnome-software useful for two specific purposes: quickly searching for applications with a GUI and managing repositories graphically. For these tasks, I would like to keep it installed on my system.
However, I prefer to manage updates and packages manually using the command line (dnf) or via TTY, and I always disable automatic updates and the PackageKit service. Therefore, I would like to prevent gnome-software from automatically starting or running in the background after each system boot.
Is there a way to configure Fedora 42 Workstation so that gnome-software is installed but only launched manually when I need to use its GUI features? I’m looking for a way to disable its autostart behavior without uninstalling the application itself.
Any guidance on how to achieve this would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps there’s a systemd service to disable or an autostart setting I can modify?
I’ve downloaded Fedora 42 MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, LXQt, and KDE. I’m currently using the MATE spin on bare metal. I’d like to reconsider GNOME because without the overhead of gnome-software (for my needs, it works much better). Thanks a lot for your contribution. Regards.
I know this isn’t what you’re asking, but I removed all packages related to gnome-software and PackageKit from my system.
I manually use dnf and flatpak. I’ve just found life to be simpler that way. If I’m missing something important, it hasn’t yet become obvious to me.
This way you still have Gnome Software available in the “app grid” when needed but it does not automatically run at boot.
Now this comment is a sort of heresy because it seems Gnome guys really really do not want us to disable Gnome Software, for some reason. There are two obvious reasons to disable it, one is the huge RAM requirements and the other is the annoying “restart” after installing updates. Plus, it does not give any information on what it is doing and DNF is so much better.
Like most of us. It is useful for searching for applications (BTW, in my opinion the really useful thing is not the search in itself, it is the information provided about each application).
My guess is the reasoning behind Gnome Software running in background is automatic updates. In other words, probably whoever designed Gnome Software believes most users don’t do “sudo dnf update” so if there isn’t something that enforces updates, many or most systems become insecure, vulnerable, etc.
Hi everyone. I update my systems daily: Windows 11 Pro and Linux Fedora 42 MATE. I also have several VirtualBox VMs with 3 Fedora, 2 Debian Trixie, and 2 Linux Mint. I’ve been using Fedora in bare metal again since last November, and I’ve always had gnome-software installed, even with the MATE desktop environment.
I always update using command-line commands with offline upgrades and apply the updates upon reboot. In the past, I’ve found my systems compromised due to incompatibilities between gnome-software and dnf5.
Personally, I prefer to update via TTY and command line (CLI) and don’t want software that unnecessarily interferes with my routines. At a certain age, you become set in your ways… And for the reasons you’ve highlighted, in addition to the graphical (GUI) control of repositories, I like having the package installed.
I have an old laptop with Intel core 2 duo P8400, 4gb of ram and sata III ssd that runs very well with Fedora 42 mate. and before fc42 with fc41 mate. I also have the vpn with automatic startup and everything, at least for my office needs, is still excellent. I bought 4 other notebooks from various retailers and I only had more problems that I then returned. In recent years the hardware has worsened, in terms of reliability, in a worrying way…