DNF Package Manager Is Now Available On Clear Linux

While Clear Linux may be extremely performant as shown in our many benchmarks, its default repository serving "bundles" (their task-based approach to package management) can be a bit light if wanting to use this Intel open-source Linux distribution on the desktop. There has been yum available via a bundle while now next-gen Yum, DNF, is also now available on Clear Linux.

Being added this past week was DNF to Clear's mixer (used for creating Clear Linux releases) and koji (build service) bundles. Clear isn't switching to DNF/Yum or making any fundamental changes, but rather simply making it available. "koji and mixer bundle provide yum already, so this commits adds the yum drop-in replacement. This enables the use case of using dnf as well."

For those unfamiliar with Clear's package management approach using bundles, it's outlined here as well as the available bundles for those wondering if something is available or not at this time. Making up the bundles are RPMs as has always been the case, but the default user interaction is via swupd for end-users.

If you are wanting to use third-party software / packages not currently packaged/bundled for Clear Linux, they do support Flatpaks as their preferred means of app sandboxing and to expand the amount of available software. But with Clear now having DNF, curiosity got the best of me late at night and decided to try it out. The primary use-case though for having Yum/DNF available is in the actual assembly for the distribution behind the scenes.

By default there isn't any repositories or Yum/DNF configuration setup when installing the yum/dnf support via the mixer bundle. For those wanting to install additional packages easily on Clear in an unofficial manner, there is the yumonclearlinux Git repository by an user that makes it a breeze for setting up the Yum configuration that can then be adapted for DNF. DNF 2.7.5 is what's found on Clear at the time of testing.

Though generally speaking if using Yum/DNF for trying to tap third-party repositories on Clear Linux, keep in mind these packages were not tuned by the Intel developers and as such, they won't magically be as fast as the rest of Clear Linux, but it's interesting anyways if trying to get some extra packages easily installed on a Clear Linux system. If there is enough interest from Phoronix readers, I might work on some comparison benchmarks in seeing how some of these EPEL/EL 7 packages compare to the performance of the native Clear Linux bundles/packages, etc (or there is also the Clear RPMs but I haven't yet investigated the possibility of say making a Frankenstein Fedora-Clear system out of that for performance tests). Let me know if you would be interested via the forums or other benchmark ideas.