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.
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I choose Debian for wholly other reasons, twenty years ago now, but during all these years their comprehensive network of mirrors has always been good enough that I never considered switching for that reason, anywhere I moved to.
debian’s cdn is crazy fast, the default apt setup in debian 13 chooses mirrors dynamically and it’s really good
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?
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.
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.
LOL. respectfully, this is a hilarious question.
if i understand correct, base distros like arch and debian have many servers and this shouldnt be an issue. Perhaps the mirrors you are choosing are slow. Ive had terrible experiences choosing geographically close mirrors. If youre using pacman maybe trying rate mirrors or reflector and just letting the it auto select for you would help.
