Does the speed/location of repos factor into your choose of distro? I am in Egypt and while linux mint repos speeds are fine when updating and installing here, fedora and manjaro are incredibility slow, manjaro especially is the slowest, like maybe 30 minutes or more slow for an install that takes a few minutes in linux mint

I am assuming that ppl in the USA/Europe don’t have this problem. Does anyone else have this same issue.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    1·
    3 hours ago

    I am fortunate enough that the speed of the package manager itself would make a bigger difference.

    But connecting to a slow mirror can be a killer so, If that was a frequent problem for me, it would absolutely factor into my decision.

    I guess the other factor is how often you are updating. For a rolling distro, it would be essential.

    On Debian Stable, I would care a lot less. Just let it update overnight once in a while.

    • Jumuta@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 days ago

      debian’s cdn is crazy fast, the default apt setup in debian 13 chooses mirrors dynamically and it’s really good

  • mech@feddit.org
    12·
    2 days ago

    Could this be related to the fact that the closest Manjaro mirrors to you are in Iran, and currently down due to the Iranian government’s internet block?
    And Fedora has pretty bad mirror selection in general.

    What you could try: run sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack && sudo pacman -Syu on Manjaro, and set fastestmirror=true in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf on Fedora.

    • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 days ago

      In my experience, dnf has pretty good mirror selection by default. Setting “fastestmirror=true” replaces the more complex mirrormanager2 heuristic, which tries to select an appropriate mirror by available bandwidth, with a simple latency check that runs before transactions. In most cases this has no effect or worsens dnfs performance. They changed the description in dnf5 to better reflect the behaviour.

      Having said that, it’s worth giving a try in a case like this. I just want to make sure that people realize that there is a reason this was never enabled by default, since this is a popular configuration tweak suggested all over the internet, whose actual function very few seem to know.

        • anyhow2503@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          It only checks mirror latency every transaction if you enable “fastestmirror”. Repositories are only synced if the local cache is out of date or the metadata timestamp has changed. There might be a way to prevent dnf from refreshing repository metadata at all, but I really don’t think that’s a good idea.

  • Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    2 days ago

    I mean, that is not how it works? Sure there are a couple ms difference in latency but if you have that large of a speed difference it is more likely a routing or configuration issue. Pacman is 1 packet at a time by default on arch, but every procedure tells you to change that if possible.

    Also your government is not the most open one when it comes to internet traffic, maybe they filter pacman more than apt?

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      1·
      3 hours ago

      It may be that they are picking geographically close mirrors that are massively slower. The difference between connecting to a very remote mirror can be up to a couple hundred milliseconds latency and a few percent in bandwidth due to “the Internet” itself.

      But the mirrors themselves can vary massively in performance. First, it may be older hardware that gets more easily overwhelmed. But it may also be on a connection with far less bandwidth. If that outgoing bandwidth is being shared across many users, you may not be getting much of it.

  • stratself@lemdro.idEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    It’s not a factor for me, but if you continually find slow speed you could try picking a mirror that has better perf. Also dnf can be incredibly slow so you may need some additional max_parallel_downloads tuning