I just updated from Fedora 29 to 30 and I realized that a lot of programs I use are out of date. For example Filezilla just updated to 3.44 but when I opened their changelog I was met with a red banner stating that my version of Filezilla is outdated and I should upgrade to 3.45.1
I’d like to upgrade some programs (such as Filezilla) to the newest version available for security reasons, but I don’t want to upgrade the entire OS to 31 or Rawhide because I use it as my day-to-day OS and don’t want a Windows 10 style bleeding edge experience. Is there a way to do it beyond switching to compiling or to downloading binaries from the program website?
If the update from 3.44 to 3.45 is really critical to you, assuming you don’t want F31 yet and you can’t wait for the update appear in the Fedora repo, I would suggest you install the flatpak from flathub. As of today, the current version there is 3.45.1 from Sept. 2019.
I would suggest you dnf remove filezilla first, before you flatpak install flathub org.filezillaproject.Filezilla
(If you have not yet used flatpak or not yet set up flathub as a repository, you need to run:
Just a note: F31 is not “bleeding edge”, and to be honest, neither is rawhide nowadays. The community dropped that way of development quite a while ago. One cannot just “break” rawhide anymore. Fedora 31 is a stable release that went through multiple rounds of testing.
Of course, bugs will be present, but they’ll be present in any version of software.
Please read this document for more information on the community’s updates policy:
@florian thanks, I’ll do that. I take it flatpak is something like snap? I was hoping for a way to snatch updates from a newer release for a program specifically but this will be OK too
@FranciscoD when I started using Fedora a couple years ago KDE was really unstable so I always stuck to the older of the two versions. I’m sure it’s not as bad as Windows, I was exaggerating, and KDE has gotten much more stable now anyway, but since it’s my day-to-day OS I want it to be as stable and secure as possible. So far I’ve found the older of the two supported versions of Fedora to be a good compromise between being up to date and having a stable and secure system (excepting these few internet-facing apps for which I really always want to have the newest version).
Then Flatpaks will be the way to go. You want software to go fast but also to go slow, which well, cannot be done easily. Maybe modularity may help, but even it has limitations when it comes to integrated pieces of software, such as whole Desktop environments.
When using Flatpaks, please remember that if you are using these off Flathub, they have not gone through the review process that Fedora packages go through. You will have to to read up on how stuff on Flathub is reviewed. It isn’t a Fedora community initiative (even if folks that run Flathub and work on Flatpak are also Fedora community contributors).