How to check your DNF History in Fedora

Frequently a harmless looking Fedora update breaks vital functionality. It’s part of the “fun” working with oh so stable and reliable Linux Desktop distributions… or is it? Regardless, we may from time to time have to check which exact package in the previous update broke some functionality, and of course people like me have no clue how to solve it (other than restoring the previous backup).

Well here’s a good place to start any such investigation: the DNF History. That’s a list of packages that were installed in previous updates.

To get an overview of the last few update commands, together with a list of how many packages have been affected, we can use “dnf history list”.

dnf history list

ID Command line                     Date and time       Action(s) Altered
13 dnf install @xfce-desktop        2025-11-14 04:35:25               121
12 dnf install xfce4-panel          2025-11-12 21:53:58                 8
11 dnf install xrdp tigervnc-server 2025-10-18 22:34:41                 5
10 dnf remove nomachine             2025-09-29 15:04:06                 1
 9 dnf install vsftpd               2025-09-02 19:25:27                 1
 8 dnf update                       2025-07-23 17:29:19              1099
 7 dnf install kinfo*               2025-07-20 18:21:37                 9
 6 dnf install ark                  2025-07-20 17:56:00                 8
 5 dnf update dolphin               2025-07-19 03:15:34                 4
 4 dnf update                       2025-03-21 14:25:49              1379
 3 dnf update cockpit               2025-03-21 14:20:21                 2
 2 dnf install lm_sensors           2025-02-11 12:00:24                 1
 1 dnf install plasma-workspace-x11 2024-12-27 18:48:40               297

In my sample output above, I can see the last 13 transactions and the actual command I’ve typed. Pretty neat! In all likelihood, the most recent one is what caused an issue. To take a closer look at that, we can use “dnf history info”, followed by the transaction id (13 in my case).

dnf history info 13
Transaction ID : 13
Begin time     : 2025-11-14 04:35:25
Begin rpmdb    : 9b3f5c7b7f2f0f242b4d2d537f4c61a05d45102e8dc9c50d72449716af77140a
End time       : 2025-11-14 04:36:18
End rpmdb      : 781819e2246af007b7017665063321fd3136a5d6b18088322e682c11687d0a44
User           : 1000 Jay Versluis <versluis>
Status         : Ok
Releasever     : 42
Description    : dnf install @xfce-desktop
Comment        : 
Packages altered:
  Action   Package                                                                   Reason          Repository
  Install  initial-setup-gui-0:0.3.101-2.fc42.x86_64                                 Group           fedora
  Install  network-manager-applet-0:1.36.0-5.fc42.x86_64                             Group           fedora
  Install  NetworkManager-l2tp-gnome-0:1.20.20-2.fc42.x86_64                         Group           fedora
  Install  NetworkManager-libreswan-gnome-0:1.2.24-2.fc42.x86_64                     Group           fedora
  Install  NetworkManager-sstp-gnome-1:1.3.1-11.fc42.x86_64                          Group           fedora
...
Replaced vim-data-2:9.1.1818-1.fc42.noarch                                         Dependency      @System
  Replaced vim-minimal-2:9.1.1818-1.fc42.x86_64                                      Group           @System
Groups altered:
  Action  Package      Reason Repository
  Install xfce-desktop User   fedora

Euippped with this knowledge, we can now revert changes using “dnf downgrade” or “dnf remove”.

Hope this helps for next time. And don’t forget to take full backups from working systems regularly! CloneZilla is your friend.

• https://clonezilla.org