I am currently using EndeavourOS, but am annoyed by the constant daily updates of 1GB and pacman not installing important dependencies automatically (ex: spell checker for document editor). I like the way Fedora works: you update whenever, important dependencies are downloaded automatically, and packages are recent-ish, but I don’t like that it takes forever to run dnf. I don’t want to use Manjaro (apparently it breaks quickly?), and the distro needs to support KDE. I know about Flatpak, but I don’t want to download 1GB of data for each app. Are there any good options?
(Yes, I can probably deal with Fedora, but dnf is slower than apt, and I don’t want to deal with external repositories for non-free software.)
EDIT: I do not want to tweak or edit configuration files, I just need something that has up to date packages and “just works”.
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There’s openSUSE tumbleweed. It’s rpm based like fedora and it’s rolling-release like arch. I don’t know what the 3rd party/nonfree software situation is like. Maybe someone else can chime in on that front.
I will add, as an arch user, I think you could easily tweak your current system to be less annoying with the updates, but I realize that’s not the question you’re asking so feel free to disregard that.
OP is complaining about dnf being too slow. I’ve heard zypper is even worse.
Fedora should ship with DNF5 pretty soon now, and it is supposed to be a lot faster than the current DNF4
Fedora 41 specifically is when it’s planned to be introduced, which would release towards the end of the year. It was initially planned for 39 but got delayed sadly, though I think there’s a way to swap to it for testing? But yeah, hopefully DNF can shirk the obvious “did not finish” joke because it really is slow
Important is subjective, do you consider Spanish spell checker important for your document editor? How about Arabic or Chinese? Why would you want all of that bloat installed by default? Better than whoever needs spell checker in a specific language installs that.
When you install a program Pacman lists the optional dependencies for it, just install the ones you want and that’s it.
As for daily updates you don’t need to update daily, just weekly or monthly is good enough, just because there are updates available doesn’t mean you should install them asap.
To speed up DNF:
/etc/dnf/dnf.conf ... max_parallel_downloads=5 max_parallel_connections=20I have found that RHEL/Rocky/Alma are very much faster at updating using DNF than Fedora, though I don’t know why.
Manjaro, even though not loved by most, does this, Arch based but few updates per time unit.
