The proposed change on the Fedora Wiki shows that next spring’s Fedora 39 may replace DNF, libdnf, and dnf-automatic with the new DNF5 packaging tool and libdnf5 support library. DNF5 dramatically improves the user experience and provides better performance for handling software management on Fedora Linux.

The proposed change is broadly summarized as follows:

We expect that the old DNF will receive only limited support from upstream, the new DNF5 will significantly improve the user experience and performance, this replacement is the second step in the upgrade of the Fedora software management stack.

Without changes, there will be multiple software management tools (DNF5, legacy Microdnf, PackageKit, and DNF) based on different libraries (libdnf, libdnf5), offering different behaviors, and not sharing history.

The development of DNF5 was announced in the Fedora-Devel list in 2020.

DNF5 eliminates Python code for faster performance in a smaller size, and it replaces existing DNF and microdnf tools. DNF5 also unifies the behavior of the software management stack, introduces a new daemon to replace PackageKit’s RPM, and performs better. In addition, according to foreign media Phoronix, DNF5 also has faster performance in querying repositories, consulting operations, RPM queries and metadata sharing.

Currently thechange proposalIt still needs to be signed off by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but given Red Hat’s own involvement in the development of DNF5, the proposal is likely to be approved.Friends who want to know more can check Change proposal on Fedora Wiki.