I installed the rolling Rome into an old laptop. I also installed the development Cooker under VirtualBox. Both with KDE.
Initial impression is positive … except for the package management GUIs.
Yes, the cmd line “dnf” is recommended over the GUIs and I can see why.
“dnfdragora” and “discover” didn’t find anything for me. They look completely broken.
“dnfdrake” works somehow. I was able find and install packages. However I could not figure out what most of the buttons do. Once a package is found, you must double-click to get a checkbox for selecting it. Right-click loads a details view. Everything is totally backwards in this GUI.
Ultimately this is a wrapper for the cmd line tool and that may have screwed the GUI design so badly.
I hope there will be a project for a proper package management tool. Simplicity is the key for a good GUI.
This is important because package management is the biggest differentiating factor between Linux distributions. Eg. KDE looks the same in every distro that uses KDE. Package installation makes the difference.
One more thing: There is a warning against using “dnf update”. Why is the command there if it is forbidden? Just remove it and nobody will use it.
In the past, many unsuspecting people have used Discover to update their systems and broke them. We had to strip that ability out. It only supports firmare, flatpak and the KDE Store now. So far, I have had good luck with it updating my BIOS/UEFI firmware.
As far as Dnfdragora and Dnfdrake, I can’t say. I have never used either one.
Edit: Why does Discover break our systems? Discover uses PackageKit which really isn’t compatible with OpenMandriva. Just remember, “OpenMandriva isn’t (your distro here).”
It is just a plain gui. I do not have problems with it now. I did when I used nvidia. But then again, I was pretty much stuck with wayland or gtk with an nvidia card
I like DNFDrake, and FlatDrake, for that matter. I’d rather have a rudimentary GUI that just works than some prettified POS like Discover that barely works.
Other than dnfdrake not that I am aware of. You are welcome to start this project or contribute to making dnfdrake better. That is how this Community distro works. Someone in the community sees a need and does something about it. Everyone is an unpaid, part-time volunteer. At present everyone that is contributing has more on their to do list than they can do.
I use the cli, so don’t know about dnfdrake but in small Linux distros like this you find what works and get used to it or you create something better.
Edit: I do not comment on Discover or dnfdragora because other than searching for software I have not used either for a very long time. And I normally use dnf search <packagename> or dnf info <packagename>. dnf search will return results with partial names, try it.
This is to keep people from borking their system. The command is not forbidden and is useful if, if you know what you are doing, and if you understand OM’s unique package management.
Expecting OM to be like other distros won’t work, it isn’t and this does apply to how we use dnf and how we do package management.
So my recommendation for Cooker or ROME users is to use sudo dnf dsync --refresh or sudo dnf dsync --allowerasing --refresh and if you have problems ask in the Support forum with a descriptive title and all the information requested. If you use --allowerasing note what packages, if any, the transaction would remove just in case. Or if it wants to remove something you do not want removed.
Edit: A helpful hint is to keep a log of your dnf transaction just in case there is a problem. Like this: sudo dnf dsync --allowerasing --refresh 2>&1 | tee /home/your_user_name/dsync.log. If you use that command again it will overwrite the old dsync.log so if you want you can change the name to something like dsync_2.log or whatever works for you.
