dnf

dnf is a package manager used to manage RPM packages. It's used in pretty much all Linux distros based around the RPM package format, and is especially notable for being used in Red Hat distributions as well as in Fedora. It was introduced to Fedora in version 18, and outed the deprecated Yum in Fedora 22.

DNF is much better than Yum was, because its rewrite addressed yum's worst problems, such as bad performance and high memory usage.

Name

DNF means Dandified Yum. There used to be a yum and yup tool, which stood for yellowdog updater, modifier and yellowdog updater, respectively. Yum was a complete rewrite of yup, and DNF is the next-gen version of the yellowdog updater (succeeding yum).

Usage

Example output of the yum install command

Like most package managers, DNF is quite simple to use. It requires root privileges in order to install and remove packages.

Installing packages

To install a package, issue:

# dnf install <package>

Uninstalling packages

To remove a package from the system, issue:

# dnf remove <package>

Updates

DNF supports updating individual packages or the entire system at once.

Full system update

To update all the packages on the system, issue:

# dnf update

Sometimes, dnf will fail to resolve dependencies for various reasons. You can use the --skip-broken option to skip packages whose dependencies could not be resolved:

# dnf update --skip-broken

Individual package update

To update an individual package, simply pass its name as the argument:

# dnf update <package>

Searching for packages

You can search the remote repository for a package:

# dnf search <string>