dnf, the experimental fork of yum was introduced in Fedora 18. Under the hood, dnf uses the libsolv library from openSUSE (also used by Zypper) and aims for near 100% compatibility with yum. Nearly all command line options are the same and instead of /etc/yum.conf, it uses /etc/dnf.conf but the configuration options are not changed. dnf is parallel installable along side yum (yum install dnf) and the plan (30:05) is to make it the new yum only by Fedora 22 so you have ample time to participate.
I have setup a bash alias (alias yum=’sudo dnf’ in ~.bashrc and source ~/.bashrc) in my system that pretends that dnf is yum so that I don’t have to throw away my muscle memory. In the course of the last several months, I have filed over a dozen bug reports and new feature requests (mostly to bring dnf in line with what yum already supports) and the core dnf (especially in Fedora 19) is usable (with the exception of one weird bug) and the performance is much better compared to yum. There are quite a few nice features missing however. This includes support for Delta RPM, history undo, parallel downloads, auto-remove, bash completion and several group commands.
Try it out and report any bugs.
Tracking the bleeding edge of Fedora development 
It seems improbable that DNF is faster without Delta RPM and parallel Downloads. I’m guessing that means its faster when those options are not being used?
Delta RPM and parallel downloading can certainly speeds up your *download* however Delta RPM also requires rebuilding the full RPM from the binary dif before installlation and that can sometimes slow things down. A similar tradeoff exists for parallel downloads. DNF is faster in general for dependency resolving, search etc.
DNF is an unfortunate name. In my head, it reads as “Did Not Finish” which is not a very positive association: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Not_Finish
You aren’t the first person to make that observation. For a prototype that shouldn’t exist on its own after a while, I think it is a fairly apt name 🙂
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The link to the DNF Delta RPM bug should be https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=909468
Done. Thanks!
It is nice that backend stuff is getting better, but is there any chance that Fedora will get a sane GUI for packages? Whenever I search for anything using PackageKit GUI I get useless results, hundreds of packages (mostly libraries) and no sorting whatsoever…
Yes. See GNOME Software Center
Hi Rahul! Just to clarify, DNF will be renamed Yum in Fedora 22, right?
Yes. That’s right