Casey Jao via devel <devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> writes:
Old rpm-ostree thread about this:
https://github.com/coreos/rpm-ostree/issues/1127
1. Debian provides a comparably sized package catalog using one-tenth the size of
Fedora's metadata. Are there any lessons that Fedora can learn from Debian?
2. Does SUSE have the same problem?
No, I don't think so. openSUSE and SUSE use zypper + libzypp instead of
dnf and iirc zypper is lighter on memory usage (but lacks the more "fancy"
features like `dnf repoquery`).
Also, the openSUSE Tumbleweed repository is smaller than the Fedora
repository (and only contains the latest rebuilds, i.e. even less
metadata). I am not 100% sure about Leap though, as I have heard horror
stories about the size of the Leap Update repository size (the
repository contains every package build for the whole release)…