I usually update through dnf but sometimes Discover says there is a “system upgrade” with however many packages that are pending upgrade, but no details provided. It requires a restart after completing.
What is the difference between the two?
One thing to add is that Discover updates from other sources including flatpak.
and firmware and BIOS updates, too.
I have my update stuff put into a simple bash script that includes flatpak so that gets taken care of.
Discovers talks to PackageKit, a project that attempts to abstract packaging concepts. So rather than Discover supporting dnf, apt, pacman, etc, it talks to PackageKit and that handles the lower level stuff.
But PackageKit is not perfect. It’s better to use dnf directly and use the flag for offline upgrades (for more reliable upgrades).
Backend of discover doesn’t know about that u did dnf update and think they are pending update in it’s database when y restarting it makes dnf update checks underhood and getting informed that there is no update anymore
It still restarts and does the whole “Updating, please do not turn off your computer” screen. Does dnf take care of that all? Is it even necessary to restart?
Using dnf is betrer than using Discover. Mostly because
sudo dnf history undo lastexists, which undoes the latest “transaction”.(Each transaction is an action of removing, reinstalling, updating and installing (a) package(s).)
Offline updates is one of the things that annoyed me most back when I was using Windows, and somehow they’ve managed to make it even worse in Fedora. Luckily you can turn it off in F41 by going to the “Software Update” section in system settings, and then changing “Apply system updates” to “Immediately”. Haven’t upgraded to 42 yet but I hope the setting is still there.
