# dnf

18 Hacker News commenters recommended dnf and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended for installing, updating and removing packages on Fedora and other RPM-based systems, with transaction history that makes changes easy to undo.

## Why people recommend it

- Transaction history makes changes undoable (3 comments): "dnf/rpm updates being transactional and easy to undo with `dnf history`" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48408380)) "Stick to RPM based systems as dnf supports transactions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46711377)) "There's no such issue with dnf, it has `dnf history`" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48761032))
- Simple, transparent, centrally configurable (3 comments): "I found working with normal `dnf` and normal config files much easier than dealing with Ignition and Butane." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46583221)) "Simple, non-invasive, transparent, (almost) all-encompassing, and centrally configurable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703513)) "dnf and zypper both make it easy to be explicit about the priorities of your repos" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48607266))
- Fast, reliable upgrades (2 comments): "IME, dnf5 is pretty much on par, if not better, in terms of speed." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49460330)) "Dnf is GOAT, upgrades don't break shit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46573009))
- Maintainer-signed packages instead of curl-bash (2 comments): "apt/dnf scripts run on packages a maintainer signed and a distro gatekept" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48357204)) "we always ought to prefer apt, dnf, over the likes of curlbash, brew, npm" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909659))

## What people warn about

- Heavy memory use and slower than apt (2 comments): "package manager like dnf consumes about 1GB of memory just to fetch package metadata" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47628235)) "dnf seems comparatively slow compared to apt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456340))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Nix](https://hackerapproved.com/p/nix.md): 378 recommend
- [Homebrew](https://hackerapproved.com/p/homebrew.md): 271 recommend
- [npm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/npm.md): 161 recommend
- [pnpm](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pnpm.md): 124 recommend
- [Cargo](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cargo.md): 123 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "dnf", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dnf/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).