dnf

Original author: Tommy Nguyen

Last modified: Mon Aug 1 17:02

dnf comes with plugins that some people are not aware of. Tracer allows you to see what applications need restarting after upgrading packages. This is necessary to ensure stability of your system. Otherwise you may experience weird behavior or crashing overtime. Sometimes if there’s too many applications or critical applications to restart you should just reboot your system, otherwise tracer can tell you which applications to restart.

First, install dnf-plugins-extras-tracer. Then the next time you upgrade your packages you should see output like:

You should restart:
  * Some applications using:
      sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

  * These applications manually:
      dnf
      firefox
      pipewire-media-session

For more information run:
    sudo tracer -iat 1624024025.9470344

You can run the command shown above to ensure nothing else needs to be restarted.

Note that running dnf upgrade inside a desktop environment is technically unsupported. It is recommended that you either run it from a tty or by using dnf offline-upgrade like so:

dnf offline-upgrade download
dnf offline-upgrade reboot

If you want dnf to automatically download and install upgrades in the background, you can use dnf-automatic.