this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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Hello,

I am using Fedora, but have a temperamental internet connection at home. Updating can be difficult because large downloads are slow and tend to reach timeouts most of the time.

Is there a way to have my system download one update from the list at a time instead of multiple?

This might at least help prevent me needing to retry upwards of 4-5 times hoping it all eventually succeeds within the timeout and failure limits it seems to have.

I did check online a bit and the manual for dnf, but web searching seems to bring up "updating a single package" not iterating through the available updates to baby my horrible internet. And the manual didn't seem to mention anything regarding this.

Hoping there is something.

Thank you very much for any suggestions or guidance.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

The major issue is to complain to/about your provider, not mess around with the workaround solutions.

That said once you have the list of packages, you can download them on your phone and seamlessly transfer them to your pc with Syncthing.

Have a look at dnf-automatic to do downloads only. I'm not sure how many retries it allows.

There is also the option of limiting your bandwidth on the PC so that it doesn't choke.

Ultimately the ISP has to provide a working service.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Hello! Thanks so much for helping me with this.

It looks we've been able to find the following for the config file for dnf:

max_parallel_downloads in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf.

Here's a post on how to increase it - so do the opposite, and set it to 1.

Also, I wanted to ask you about your suggestion for downloading on the phone.

What method or methods were you considering for downloading the packages on a phone? I haven't heard of this before.

Thank you again for taking the time to write back.

I really appreciate it.