PackageKit is the new software manager in Fedora 9. It completely replaced Pirut and pup in Fedora 9. The main advantage of using PackageKit is that it provides a uniform fronted to some of the common package management systems like yum, apt, rpm, zypp etc. which are available across different distributions. You can read more about PackageKit here. Screen shots from the application is shown below.

After using the application for almost a month I am really surprised that the folks in the Fedora project made PackageKit the one and only graphical package management system in Fedora 9. In my opinion there are lot more features that are needed before this application can become the default package manager let alone the one and only package manager.

The two main features that this application lacks currently are multiple package install & remove and category install. In Pirut multiple packages can be installed all at once. Each package can be selected by using the check mark on the left. Similarly different packages can be set to be installed as well as to be removed at the same time. Once the packages are marked then pressing apply updates takes care of the whole process simultaneously. On the contrary in PackageKit only one task can be take up at a time. For example only one package can be installed at a time. No other operation can be performed while the package is being installed.

Category install is another feature I completely miss. On one of my office computers I have a Fedora 9 installation which was upgraded (live, successful upgrade) from Fedora 8. The installation did not have GNOME as the desktop environment and hence I decided to install GNOME. Unlike pirut there is no way one can select to install a category (in this case GNOME desktop environment) and since multiple package install is not yet supported it is time consuming to install all the required packages for a large desktop environment like GNOME. Until theses features have been added I would have not made this as the one and only graphical package management system in Fedora 9. I cannot find Pirut and Pup in the Fedora 9 repositories even if I wanted to install them. Hopefully by Fedora 10 release these features are added to PackageKit.