On major Fedora version upgrade, the official instructions say it’s very important to update the current packages before doing the actual upgrade. If it’s so important, I don’t get why this is something the user is allowed to forget, especially given this is all a gui process. Fedora should either automatically run these updates when the user tries to upgrade or it should visibly block off the upgrade until the user updates. I should note I post this after three or four upgrade attempts over the course of a couple weeks, all of which failed with no message in the gui.
I would strongly advise that you do NOT use any gui for any full system upgrade. It looks nice and hides lots of the detail from you, but if anything DOES go wrong, the chances of you actually seeing the error message is slim.
It’s fine when it all works, until it doesn’t.
Upgrade using DNF. Quite why the documentation recommends using Gnome Software and KDE Discover for this is beyond me; it could do with an overhaul from it’s 2024 version I suspect.
I would suggest following these docs every time.
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The GUI, like most GUIs, works in most cases, but will fail in corner cases that require more advanced steps—that’s when one does need to use the command line to debug packages and so on. The GUI upgrade is tested by the community at every release, so it’s not something that is just “expected to work”—it does work for lots of people.
The bit about upgrading the system packages before running an upgrade is primarily to reduce the combinations of packages that are being updated—because sometimes, certain packages and conflicts may be fixed later in the cycle as updates, and if one hasn’t run an update to receive these fixes, it could affect the upgrade.
I think gnome-software etc. blocking upgrades unless a system is up to date is a good idea—could you please file this with the gnome developers? that’ll be the best way of getting some feedback on this to see if it can be implemented: