[Fedora 39] Why does Discover say there's updates while `dnf` say there's none? Also, why does Discover need to reboot to install said updates?

UntouchedWagons@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 81 points –

This is my one main complaint about Fedora Linux.

19

Those updates in Discover are for flatpak, not dnf. You can verify that with flatpak update.

As for discover wanting to restart to do their update, that's a fedora thing for an extra level of safety while updating. You can read about it here.

As for discover wanting to restart to do their update, that's a fedora thing for an extra level of safety while updating

That shouldn't trigger for flatpaks though. No risk of breaking the system while updating flatpaks

Discover shows updates to both your flatpaks apps and dnf apps

Those are Flatpak updates. dnf can't see them I think.

happens to me in Arch with yay.

You can turn it off in the settings (may be system settings, think it's called offline updates).

It's a feature Gnome added and then KDE added too. Fedora isn't the only distro to implement it, but the most popular.

Try this: "sudo dnf update ; sudo flatpak update"

Discover checks knewstuff (global themes, plasmoids, etc.), Flatpaks, firmware and snaps, (which all have a relevant backend package something like (discover-backend-packagekit). Discover, well more like PackageKit, will let you know if a reboot is necessary if there's something like a kernel update.

If the kernel, initramfs, or a driver is updated, you have to reboot the computer to apply them (you can't reload the kernel while it's running). A user might not know or notice this, so GUI installers (and some CLI tools like pacman on Endeavour) often warn the user or sometimes force a reboot.

I thought we would have learned from Windows, you should never force a reboot.

I've never seen a distro force a reboot, Windows style. Only ever advise people to reboot.

Well, then I don't understand the downvotes, lol. The person i replied to said sometimes a distro will force a reboot, I said that's bad, and a bunch of people apparently disagree with that.

So when people say 'force a reboot' there are two things it can mean:

  1. a reboot is required for updates to actually take effect. Linux sometimes does this for things like the kernel.

  2. the OS forces you to stop everything you are doing and reboots the machine. I have only ever seen Windows do this. Not Linux, not even MacOS.

This might be where the confusion is coming in. @rtxn is referring to number 1 but the rest of us are referring to number 2

Those distros "force" you to reboot when you want to update (as opposed to allowing you to do the update on the running system). Think Windows 7 and earlier, that kind of forced reboots, back when people were fine with the way Windows did updates.

I had reverse situation, discover said there's none of apps i need or/and updates, while dnf was working flawlessly