@@Chr0n0s38dnf can be sped up quite a bit with a few tweaks in dnf.conf, zypper is a bastard that has annoyed me with slow speed and seemingly no solution for years.
Your videos convinced me to use openSUSE. I repaired a broken laptop I aquired for free and now I use it to dual boot windows and openSUSE eventually I hope to switch it completely to linux but right now I dual boot for learning how to set everything up. I appreciate your content. Keep it up!
There is Leap which is the stable version and there is Tumbleweed which isa rolling release (often updates with the latest stuff). I don't use openSUSE as my daily driver but it is very GUI. It is good if you come from a window background.
Hey, I'm in Australia and zypper mirrors are very slow. What i found that improved them, mostly, was using the CDN package in the opensuse repos. "zypper in openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed" I also enabled systemd-resovled (And configured it) to enable dns caching. This helped greatly. Anyway hope that this is helpful to some people. 😄
Im a recent convert to Tumbleweed and so far i love it. The only issue i have is how incredibly slow zypper is. Im in the Eastern USA specifically Florida and the download rates are horrendous. So i completely feel your frustration with Zypper. Everything about the distro has been fantastic with one two exceptions. The Zypper being super duper slow and some wonky stuff i had to deal with on the firewall. The firewall issue i solved, the zypper issue even with mirrorsorcerer isnt fixable it seems. I came from Fedora and though DNF was slow, it was never as slow as Zypper. With DNF5 coming out soon, its blazing fast. Seriously, OpenSUSE really needs to look at Zypper with parallel downloads and updates to mirrors.
Zypper is a little slow compared to some other package managers like apt and pacman, but it doesn’t bother me too much personally. I currently use openSUSE daily, and I can work with being patient while zypper is doing work. It would be quite cool to see it be a bit faster however!
I don't understand why there is so much discussion about package managers. They have to work reliably and be reasonably fast, that's all. I use the package manager once a week for my update, maybe twice, and I can wait a few minutes then. And the speed was never a real issue for me on any distribution.
@@matthiasbendewald1803 in my experience when I don't have something on my new system I want to have it now, not 5 minutes from now. It's like clicking the icon and waiting for 5 minutes for it to open, no one would do that. After some months and installation of most packages the issue disappears, but for the first few weeks on a fresh system the slow package manager is killing you. You can't always predict what you would need, and installing absolutely everything goes against basic minimalism and system maintenance recommendations.
@@donkey7921 No Not completely. If you have to do something with your PC, it is annoying to wait for it to Just start. But you won't start your update If you dont have the time for it. You can usually delay that and do the update while you do something where that waiting time doesn't bother you. It's still relevant, but it doesn't Matter If updating Takes 5 or 10 minutes. It shouldn't Take hours of course, but it also never does on tumbleweed,at least Not in my experience.
Their biggest flaw is their slow repos and mirrors. Not good here in Japan. This is why so many distros can't go global--they aren't really set up to distribute sofware worldwide.
Recently jumped over to the ol' Chameleon train. I love that you can just hop into a support chat and there are folks willing and maybe even excited to help out with issues. I think I'm staying on TW...really liking it. Cheers!
Trying openSUSE Tumbleweed because of you. I had to roll back once because my install of Windows encrypted a mounted partition and I messed up a fix from tty. Very grateful for the snapshots. I might be too used to slow computers that my habits probably carry over onto newer and faster computers without much thought. I'm used to starting updates in the background for my games and going about other business. If I think about it, my current install probably is slower than my previous EndeavourOS install, but I guess it hasn't impacted me much. Maybe I don't start an update when I need to pick up my laptop and go in 5 minutes, but I probably would have waited for the end of the day anyways. It could be a situation like the AUR. General advice I've seen is to limit AUR usage to limit how much stuff breaks. I guess my zypper usage is pretty light, so the speed difference is less exaggerated and noticeable for me.
been using fedora silverblue evern since you made its video, just had a bunch of issues with workflow, for example being unable to see mp4 thumbnails, im going to be looking forward to the opensuse video, thinking of switching HONESTLY
I cant agree more. The only thing i like about zypper is the structure of the output of searching and installing packages. It would be amazing if the output structure of zypper got merged dnf5 on opensuse.
Daily drove Tumbleweed for a few years straight, the repos and package manager were the biggest downfall for me. My install slowly became less and less stable over time until it eventually drove me to switch. Trying Fedora for the first time now and going to see how it goes.
Maybe the reason they're not "fixing it" is because it doesn't matter that much as it works and the average user doesn't install- or uninstall software that frequently anyway?
One issue I had with it was the packman packages not being synced with the normal repos , causing really weird dependency issues, and having to manually intervene many times because of this.
as a gentoo user, I don't understand the issue people have with slow package managers. Just start it and do other stuff until its done. It's not like you have to sit around and twiddle your thumbs until it's done.
I think zypper is slow for those that aren't in the EU and use the stock mirrors. If you want it to be faster you need to use mirrors that are near the country you live in or in the country you live in. The first time I used openSUSE it was slow for me as well as it would use the official openSUSE mirrors. But then I changed the mirrors to the fastest in my country which are located on a university server near me. Way faster
Yep, I agree. Since Tumbleweed might be the most popular variant of openSUSE and also the first openSUSE experience many people might have, the sluggish performance of Zypper is something that will bother many people quickly and make them go away. A fast package manager is especially essential for a rolling-release distro like Tumbleweed. I doubt they would switch to DNF5. But I'm afraid that adding DNF5 yourself makes the system as prone to break as Arch if you're not careful when updating. Maybe Debian Testing is the best fire-and-forget rolling distro for many people then?
Exactly why I stopped using Opensuse. The updates were so painfully slow to do in the US. The slowest updates ever. An update that would be pretty fast with apt or pacman taking 30-60 minutes was just to much for me. I really hope they fix this problem though, cuz I would like to play with Slowroll at some point.
I really don't care so much if the package manager is not that fast, since it does the correct job. Zypper uses a retroactive update strategy, in a way you can update a 1 year outdated installation without breaking it, which you definitely can't achieve in Arch Linux, for instance. This is only possible because Zypper installs every update from the oldest to the newest one, sequentially - the German way of doing things.
openSUSE's actual biggest flaw is it's userbase who lean on the older side that has used it for eons. They overlook some stuff and get very defensive if anyone has any issues.
Zypper's default download speed is really very slow (around 100 kbps for me in Southeast Asia), but after using "Mirror sorcerer" things got much better (although still not as good as apt/pacman which mirrors directly to my region). Looks like Mirrorsorcerer helped choose the most appropriate zypper and mirror configuration for me. At least for those of you who don't want to bother setting up Zypper configurations, but still want to use Zypper (with the consequence of not being optimal download speed) I think this would be a good choice.
I was just in the second biggest shopping mal chain of my country and noticed they are using (open)SUSE for all of their digital systems in stores. It would just be great if more people know about that. Every Person in the modern world uses Linux in one or an other way but nearly no one knows about it.
I am happy OpenSuse gets some support from Linux UA-camrs. but to be fair i really disagree with your statement about how slow the zypper is. Today, after week off I got 5761 updates in the zypper. (first sudo zypper ref, then sudo zypper up and I got 5761 updates). Download time 13 minutes, installation time l 15 minutes. Located in Poland, having 600 mbit Internet so nothing spectacular.
I don't know. I don't install things often, so I only worry about update speed. In my experience, updating tumbleweed wasn't really an issue if I did it nearly on a daily basis, because the updates were small. So, I guess the complaints about zypper might be valid for some people, but definitely not for me.
aren't dnf based package managers always typically slower though? I know fedora's dnf manager is slow by default but you can modify a config file to speed things up.
Zypper came to be in a time when Fedora's/Red Hat's YUM was falling short. Zypper was quite an improvement but then Red Hat surprised us with DNF which was a complete game changer. It's still developed in Python but I think we could have something way better developed in Rust or Go to create the next openSUSE package manager.
I hope you do know of the 'time' command to preface any other command in order to show clock time. It takes the guesswork out of if something is running faster or slower than normal. Anyway, I've been using openSUSE as my main server for well over 8 years, including a lift and shift P2V of it, and been pleased with everything, including the incorporation of Snapper with Zypper and YaST, if you are using btrfs. A few times it's saved my bacon when an update goes pear shaped and I was back running in the time of another reboot.
AGAIN as I've told you in previous video comments, OpenSuSe now has a CDN sponsored mirror, on old installs just do sudo zypper in openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed and it'll automatically reconfigure the main repos over. I got a notable speedup after doing so. The OBS repos wont change so refreshing those will still be kinda slow unfortunately. Hopefully they'll get those moved over as well. Let's see if you read this this time, fourth time's the charm right? Or is it 5 or 6... Also, I thought you installed Vivaldi via Distrobox? Why do you still have the Vivaldi repos active?
No need to get saucy, I don't see every comment. I will check that out, as I've never heard of it. As for Vivaldi, I stopped using it through distrobox because they update it too often and it breaks every time there's an update. So I just downloaded it through the repos and then pinned it so it never updates.
I've switched to Linux late last year. I've tried all major distros (and some unusual ones like nixOS) before deciding to go with an Arch based distro. openSUSE tumbleweed on paper was one of the more interesting distros, but in practice I just didn't like it as much as I thought I would. It's idea of a unified configuration management was very appealing to me, but in reality it looked like a half broken, disjointed mashup worse than Windows configs. When it comes to package managers, nothing comes close to pacman IMO. It's just a joy to use, both for searching and for installing/updating stuff. I don't mind the cryptic flags, because the fish shell both suggests my most used options and supports good help. Worst case scenario that problem is solved with some aliases.
Have you taken a look at sypper? (strait from opensuse news) As part of bench marking and prototyping for mirror infrastructure, a new tool was developed, sypper. While its intended purpose is a little bit different, it can be used for pre-downloading packages for zypper. Bench marking shows that it downloads 4-5 times faster by using concurrent downloads and skipping some advanced checks, which zypper does. So check the read-me if you want to experiment with the download speed.
I know it is Open Suh-Sah, but part of me wants me to say Open Susie 😂 Edit: I liked and I already rung the bell, why do you think I am here so early? Lol
Say it however you want. I know how they want it pronounced, but I still pronounce it sue'see' or more accurately, 'SUSE', because that's how it's spelled. It isn't spelled SUSA. If they want it pronounced that way, then they should change it. But SUSE stands for Software und System Entwicklung, (Software and System Development) which is pronounced with an 'E' sound, like 'entertainment'. It's at least a German acronym though, and it's still better than saying Gahnome (Gnome) or Mawtay (MATE) which are pre-existing words. I'm not going to mispronounce words, like an idiot who can't read, just because someone else wants me to say it that way. Those words were already well established, with well defined pronunciations, long before those projects existed.
My wish would be not faster, but more inclusive solution such as Bauh. Then Flatpaks, Appimages and Snaps and rpm packages could all be handled in one interface. You are right though, openSuse is rock solid. Thanks for putting it on our radar.
I am living also in Germany and it is faster. But on big gcc update system has updated 1890 packages and it took thirty minutes. Even in Germany is by far the slowest packages manager, packman and dnf for example they can update the same amount of packages in ten minutes. Is not only the mirrors zypper is really slow also on installation part. But yes if you are leaving for example in China i have heard stories that it could take more than an hour.
SuSE was my fist distribution at the time where you would buy Linux in a box from the bookstore. For me it's biggest flaw is still YaST - it made me search for greener pastures.
There is another reason why pacman is so much faster than anything else. All other distribuitions run a shitload of post-installation scripts. And Opensuse/Suse were always the slowest. Back then when rpm binary was used and it's no different today. I cannot see this changing anytime soon.
Worst thing about OTW is how boring it is. After going through the install I was like “now what?” What kind of rolling release distro just works out of the box, with everything needed already set up? Ridiculous. No seriously, that’s why I went back to Arch. I thought I was done with tinkering, blowing up my system and doing it all over again, but apparently not. OTW will be my retirement distro when I’m ready to leave that behind.
I actually just think zypper and opensuse's setup is objectively the worst package management out there. There is no autoremove, its unbelievably slow, and removing patterns is basically impossible. I much prefer arch despite it's cryptic ass commands because being able to just -Rns a whole group is amazing. Everytime I try to do something like an autoremove in zypper it tries to remove things I actually want, like tlp, and flatpak for example. I am considering going in and removing all the btrfs partitions except for my home and downloading arch instead XD, only thing really stopping me is secure boot.
I'm a newbie, so my question might be a bit silly, but can I ask, what exactly is autoremove, or removing patterns? I'm just trying to determine whether I personally need to worry about the downsides of zypper. A lot of people, for example, hate package managers that are slow, and call them bad for that. I personally don't care really, as long as it's stable and doesn't cause errors or bugs. I don't care about weird syntax either. Also, secure boot? You mean that it is only available on openSUSE and not Arch?
And then there's Windows Update. Compared to that, Zypper is lightning fast :D (I had Debian installation going at the same time as Zypper zup & Windows Update. Linux was ready way before Windows's simple malicious software removal toolkit update & security update).
Zypper is interesting and sometimes I don't really understand why they did not use DNF like other RPM distros. Though I find using the YaST software manager makes handling most of this easy.
I definitely understand that zypper can be slow but I don't think it's that much of a priority, which is probably why it's not a huge focus for the team. Sure it could be faster, but it does the job and you can just sit it in the background while you do other things. /shrug
Suses biggest flaw: sudo prompts for the root password by default, why choose this weird setting no other distro seems to do it this way? No straight forward way to change network settings from the cli without editing text files or the dreaded yast-gui!
Today there was a 2211 packages updates on my system. Yeah it took around an hour lol Heck windows updates are probably faster. But speed aside opensusa is just great! And hyprland is supported very well, which was the reason i did the switch in the first place, but now i love how stable tumbleweed is while being a rolling release
@@ukdave57 yeah, especially because i have fast internet connection lol It's crazy though, that zypper is this slow on tumbleweed which get tons of updates every 2 or 3 days. I feel like windows updates are actually faster
Regarding reducing the number of projects at Open Suse: Wouldn't it be a good thing to shut down the Tumbleweed project in favour of Slowroll now that Leap takes the ALP path? It would also make the effect of Zypper being slow less dominant as updates would only arrive once a month I think. I am not sure how much effort goes into Snowroll at all at the moment, though.
No because Tumbleweed is the upstream for a number of their projects. Tumbleweed is kind of like mainline Fedora in that regard. Slowroll could be considered almost like CentOS. Leap then would be like Alma/Rocky.
No, Slowroll is fundamentally reliant on the existence of Tumbleweed and is basically just the equivalent of Manjaro for OpenSUSE, and there is doubt whether or not Slowroll will even prove to be any more stable than Tumbleweed while increasing the maintenance burden on OpenSUSE as a whole.
Don't do updates on a Tuesday haha wait till Wednesday. The number of times while downloading all the updates a package is replaced with a newer one and no longer available has made me avoid updating on Tuesdays like the plague.
Agreed. Zypper's forces a repo update if you haven't refreshed in the last *ten* minutes. As mentioned, just to search for a package, you have to wait for a minute or two. Ridiculous default (and I couldn't override it with the config file). Also, TW is fun but i had the rollback completely fail when I needed it... couldn't roll back to any snapshot.
Ive found Zypper to be slow even compared to DNF. And i have a fast computer. Also found it more complicated when installing new packages. Asks way too many questions compared to dnf/apt/pacman. And at times brings back memories of Dependency Hell
Its more likely that Dnf replaces Zypper on OpenSuse than Zypper is rewritten. At least there is a timeline and public progress on DNF5. I think dnf is preferred in one of the immutable spins.
I Heard this complain quite a lot, but honestly I am not sure how big this is. I just hit dup and I let it do its thing, I do my work. I understand that some people are living in the add/remove packages so this might be problematic, but I just don't think it is that much. At the end of the day , apart from speed , zipper is solid and good. This is of course my use case. Now about the time it need , I did yesterday a dup , and it had 2GB of packages. Unfortunately I did not keep a timer, but it was not more than 15 minutes. I will test it though again and post here just for reference . Feb 6 1,3GB of updates . That took 9 minutes
Serious question...what exactly is people's usecase that they have to use zypper several times a day, everyday? I mean if tinkering around is all you do, sure, then speed is an issue. But for regular people you need zypper to set your system up and then it's like zypper dup once a week and just work with the software you got. It's not like a regular user permanently install or removes packages once they got their system all set up.
Zypper isn't slow, the mirrors are slow, the package manager is actually pretty fast, not as fast as pacman, but faster than apt, plus you can also disable auto refresh of the mirrors by editing the repo file and replacing the 1 with a 0.
Honestly I think apt is the slowest package manager out there. The fact it still doesn't download in parallel is just absurd. An alternate frontend like nala shouldn't be necessary. DNF's refresh is also extremely slow. It also refreshes way too frequently.
@@Chr0n0s38 And downloading packages is the fastest part of the whole process, once its finished downloading the packages it then goes through and unpacks everything, and then when its finished doing that then it can actually start installing them, its like a three stage process, weird that no one seems to complain about apt being slow though.
@@benjy288 Well I'll be the exception for you lol. Apt is way too slow. I honestly can't bring myself to use Debian based systems just because of how much apt sucks.
This was the very first OS I ever installed on my computer (don't remember which version it was anymore, but it was old). Later I finally got my hands on a Windows XP sp3, but still had no graphics card, and actually Wine on SUSE played Gumboy better than the Windows it was made for 😂! No bs, if anybody would be that dedicated, can check for himself! It's still one of the best distros, but with Gecko being the spinoff that indeed improves everything.
your mileage may vary. zypper doesn't do parallel downloads. It readily saturates a ↓ 58,6 Mbit/s ↑ 11,7 Mbit/s connection. Upgraded 3460 packages, some 12GiB altogether in 12 min wall time and 7min 39.850s CPU time.
Mirrors are a community effort, although the CDN helped quite a lot with this issue, but the parallel downloads argument is pretty pointless, and developer time would be better spent elsewhere. Likely the reason why it is not actively worked on. If you have the time to measure how long a package manager downloads something you have a lot of free time on your hand that would be better spent elsewhere or you're doing OS maintenance wrong 🙃 `zypper` has probably the best output syntax, and highlighting out of all the package managers I've used. Not like I see it a lot as MicroOS and Aeon are my main systems ^-^ Nobody likes to work on old, boring stuff, and developers are no exception so - like most of the FOSS world - will tend to focus on the "new and shiny" stuff. This is also one of the main reasons why FOSS moves so much faster compared to proprietary software. Considering that we're getting software for free made by volunteers in their free-time I'm perfectly fine with this. I would argue that our biggest flaw is YaST and shouldn't be installed on a desktop system. It is super redundant.
It's like anytime someone complains about something, we get comments like yours. Almost as if giving criticism somehow draws you out from under your bridge. Do you not know that zypper is used to install things too, therefore it's more than just about maintaining the system? And you completely ignore the fact that I said outside the slowness, Zypper is a good package manager. So your points were obviously only half baked if you didn't get through that part of the video, which is silly since I said that at the beginning.
@@TheLinuxCast Considering that I'm a former Board member of openSUSE I would like to point out that my comment wasn't trolling, but a simple reply to your video where you claim that zypper is our biggest flaw to which my reply is simply that it is not. I think you should read my reply once again and better understand it before you make accusations. > And you completely ignore the fact that I said outside the slowness, Zypper is a good package manager. So your points were obviously only half baked if you didn't get through that part of the video, which is silly since I said that at the beginning. I did watch your video, thus I was able to make the reply I did. Zypper bothers you so much that you made a video of it.. I mean... yea. And btw I hope the DNF doc worked for you since I was the original author.
So what you're saying is that we should never criticize anything, ever, we should just ignore it because it's out of sight out of mind? Which of course ignores the fact that sometimes, like when you install something, you're going to be sitting waiting for it.
As ever, ' love the linux cast. Awesome stuff, Matt. When I Sused for 4 years, 20 years ago, I maybe upgraded packages twice. n_n My 2nd mainstay daily driver was Sabayon, just before it went half binary jank, and source upgrading didn't feel slow, and I upgraded constantly. Heh. For fun, try spend a day with every utterance of "mirror" or "mirrors" done in a strong Scottish accent. ;) I swear, 90% of your "mirrors" are "meers". Hehehe. Mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. m' ir rRrRrRrRr ror. mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. The Scottish technique... If anything, is just fun. But meerkats are fun too. :)
The new opensus logo is crap. Anyway I only upgrade monthly once because the mirrors are slow. The features of zypper redeem whatever overhead it has compared to other package managers.
MX Linux is based on Debian (and antiX). It's good for less resources computer hardware, and it doesn't use systemd as its init system. Which one is better? It depends on the user. I prefer openSUSE or Debian itself.
How to fix horrible battery life on linux? I am using manjaro. Things that don't really work are tlp, auto cpufreq and power profiles daemon. Powertop does very little help. I just made the dualboot a few days ago.
try something like opensuse or ubuntu instead. arch based distros have way more problems than the enterprise derived ones... this is coming from a gentoo user
@@AK-fu8ij I had some issue with mint, ubuntu looks like a horrible tablet os, I prefer kde (no, I can't use kubuntu, it does not support dualbooting, too hard to dualboot) and openSUSE has a horribly slow package manager. Keep in mind I am a new user but I just like arch but it is slightly difficult to install.
I am always surprise how arch's fast to update and 10%'s time's download, 10%'s update, then 80% of the time's dkms driver bullshit, then mkinitcpio then grub update.
I wanted to give you a car for me to tell you that Susan put in your other videos. You said it was slow I want bro and blah blah blah but I use it for two years now and I don’t have a problem with it installed everything that I want and if you want to have all that so I hope you have a good day.
I'd say that about Slackware. Installing was a pain, upgrading was much worse. I've broken just about every Slackware install due to some dependency related issue. I may install it on a virtual machine to see if it has improved since I last used it.
There's new stuff in the TLC Shop! shop.thelinuxcast.org
I have never had TW prompt me to refresh repositories, it just does it itself. You are right abut zypper/Yast being slow though
there seems to be a problem with the SSL certificate of the store though
As someone who uses Gentoo, I can tell you that Zypper is not the slowest package manager.
Zypper does not need to deal with even 10% of stuff portage needs to handle, so not a fair comparison.
Agreed. Honestly I find zypper to be one of the faster package managers. DNF is really slow for some reason. Apt is also way slower.
apt os slower to be honest
@@Chr0n0s38dnf can be sped up quite a bit with a few tweaks in dnf.conf, zypper is a bastard that has annoyed me with slow speed and seemingly no solution for years.
Portage is fast for what it has to deal with
“it went faster as I was recording “ - the classic… love for that
Your videos convinced me to use openSUSE. I repaired a broken laptop I aquired for free and now I use it to dual boot windows and openSUSE eventually I hope to switch it completely to linux but right now I dual boot for learning how to set everything up. I appreciate your content. Keep it up!
There is Leap which is the stable version and there is Tumbleweed which isa rolling release (often updates with the latest stuff).
I don't use openSUSE as my daily driver but it is very GUI. It is good if you come from a window background.
Hey,
I'm in Australia and zypper mirrors are very slow. What i found that improved them, mostly, was using the CDN package in the opensuse repos.
"zypper in openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed"
I also enabled systemd-resovled (And configured it) to enable dns caching. This helped greatly.
Anyway hope that this is helpful to some people. 😄
Im a recent convert to Tumbleweed and so far i love it. The only issue i have is how incredibly slow zypper is. Im in the Eastern USA specifically Florida and the download rates are horrendous. So i completely feel your frustration with Zypper. Everything about the distro has been fantastic with one two exceptions. The Zypper being super duper slow and some wonky stuff i had to deal with on the firewall. The firewall issue i solved, the zypper issue even with mirrorsorcerer isnt fixable it seems.
I came from Fedora and though DNF was slow, it was never as slow as Zypper. With DNF5 coming out soon, its blazing fast. Seriously, OpenSUSE really needs to look at Zypper with parallel downloads and updates to mirrors.
Zypper is a little slow compared to some other package managers like apt and pacman, but it doesn’t bother me too much personally. I currently use openSUSE daily, and I can work with being patient while zypper is doing work. It would be quite cool to see it be a bit faster however!
I don't understand why there is so much discussion about package managers. They have to work reliably and be reasonably fast, that's all. I use the package manager once a week for my update, maybe twice, and I can wait a few minutes then. And the speed was never a real issue for me on any distribution.
@@matthiasbendewald1803 in my experience when I don't have something on my new system I want to have it now, not 5 minutes from now. It's like clicking the icon and waiting for 5 minutes for it to open, no one would do that. After some months and installation of most packages the issue disappears, but for the first few weeks on a fresh system the slow package manager is killing you. You can't always predict what you would need, and installing absolutely everything goes against basic minimalism and system maintenance recommendations.
dude, what world do you live in? "a little slow?" 5 min vs 30 min is not "a little slow."
this the same argument that an OS on hard drive starting slow is fine, because it gives time to go get coffee.
@@donkey7921 No Not completely. If you have to do something with your PC, it is annoying to wait for it to Just start. But you won't start your update If you dont have the time for it. You can usually delay that and do the update while you do something where that waiting time doesn't bother you.
It's still relevant, but it doesn't Matter If updating Takes 5 or 10 minutes. It shouldn't Take hours of course, but it also never does on tumbleweed,at least Not in my experience.
Their biggest flaw is their slow repos and mirrors. Not good here in Japan. This is why so many distros can't go global--they aren't really set up to distribute sofware worldwide.
Hmm, I never thought of that. Have you decided to try a different distro, more suitable for Japan users? If so, what did you end up settling on?
Recently jumped over to the ol' Chameleon train. I love that you can just hop into a support chat and there are folks willing and maybe even excited to help out with issues. I think I'm staying on TW...really liking it. Cheers!
Looking forward to hearing your DNF5 long term experience. Zyppers slowness is my main complaint
Trying openSUSE Tumbleweed because of you. I had to roll back once because my install of Windows encrypted a mounted partition and I messed up a fix from tty. Very grateful for the snapshots.
I might be too used to slow computers that my habits probably carry over onto newer and faster computers without much thought. I'm used to starting updates in the background for my games and going about other business. If I think about it, my current install probably is slower than my previous EndeavourOS install, but I guess it hasn't impacted me much. Maybe I don't start an update when I need to pick up my laptop and go in 5 minutes, but I probably would have waited for the end of the day anyways.
It could be a situation like the AUR. General advice I've seen is to limit AUR usage to limit how much stuff breaks. I guess my zypper usage is pretty light, so the speed difference is less exaggerated and noticeable for me.
been using fedora silverblue evern since you made its video, just had a bunch of issues with workflow, for example being unable to see mp4 thumbnails, im going to be looking forward to the opensuse video, thinking of switching HONESTLY
I cant agree more. The only thing i like about zypper is the structure of the output of searching and installing packages. It would be amazing if the output structure of zypper got merged dnf5 on opensuse.
It's down to your mirrors, when I do a zypper ref, it takes about 1.5 - 2 seconds.
Daily drove Tumbleweed for a few years straight, the repos and package manager were the biggest downfall for me. My install slowly became less and less stable over time until it eventually drove me to switch. Trying Fedora for the first time now and going to see how it goes.
Maybe the reason they're not "fixing it" is because it doesn't matter that much as it works and the average user doesn't install- or uninstall software that frequently anyway?
"i just like trolling people because its fun"
truer words have never been spoken.
One issue I had with it was the packman packages not being synced with the normal repos , causing really weird dependency issues, and having to manually intervene many times because of this.
as a gentoo user, I don't understand the issue people have with slow package managers. Just start it and do other stuff until its done. It's not like you have to sit around and twiddle your thumbs until it's done.
I think zypper is slow for those that aren't in the EU and use the stock mirrors. If you want it to be faster you need to use mirrors that are near the country you live in or in the country you live in. The first time I used openSUSE it was slow for me as well as it would use the official openSUSE mirrors. But then I changed the mirrors to the fastest in my country which are located on a university server near me. Way faster
Yep, I agree. Since Tumbleweed might be the most popular variant of openSUSE and also the first openSUSE experience many people might have, the sluggish performance of Zypper is something that will bother many people quickly and make them go away. A fast package manager is especially essential for a rolling-release distro like Tumbleweed. I doubt they would switch to DNF5. But I'm afraid that adding DNF5 yourself makes the system as prone to break as Arch if you're not careful when updating. Maybe Debian Testing is the best fire-and-forget rolling distro for many people then?
Exactly why I stopped using Opensuse. The updates were so painfully slow to do in the US. The slowest updates ever. An update that would be pretty fast with apt or pacman taking 30-60 minutes was just to much for me. I really hope they fix this problem though, cuz I would like to play with Slowroll at some point.
I really don't care so much if the package manager is not that fast, since it does the correct job. Zypper uses a retroactive update strategy, in a way you can update a 1 year outdated installation without breaking it, which you definitely can't achieve in Arch Linux, for instance.
This is only possible because Zypper installs every update from the oldest to the newest one, sequentially - the German way of doing things.
Im working on a way to make zypper parallel download pakages. That could speed up part of the process at least.
@@kenaar yeah, parallelizing the download of the packages would be really great.
openSUSE's actual biggest flaw is it's userbase who lean on the older side that has used it for eons. They overlook some stuff and get very defensive if anyone has any issues.
Zypper's default download speed is really very slow (around 100 kbps for me in Southeast Asia), but after using "Mirror sorcerer" things got much better (although still not as good as apt/pacman which mirrors directly to my region). Looks like Mirrorsorcerer helped choose the most appropriate zypper and mirror configuration for me. At least for those of you who don't want to bother setting up Zypper configurations, but still want to use Zypper (with the consequence of not being optimal download speed) I think this would be a good choice.
I was just in the second biggest shopping mal chain of my country and noticed they are using (open)SUSE for all of their digital systems in stores.
It would just be great if more people know about that.
Every Person in the modern world uses Linux in one or an other way but nearly no one knows about it.
I am happy OpenSuse gets some support from Linux UA-camrs. but to be fair i really disagree with your statement about how slow the zypper is. Today, after week off I got 5761 updates in the zypper. (first sudo zypper ref, then sudo zypper up and I got 5761 updates). Download time 13 minutes, installation time l 15 minutes. Located in Poland, having 600 mbit Internet so nothing spectacular.
I don't know. I don't install things often, so I only worry about update speed. In my experience, updating tumbleweed wasn't really an issue if I did it nearly on a daily basis, because the updates were small. So, I guess the complaints about zypper might be valid for some people, but definitely not for me.
aren't dnf based package managers always typically slower though? I know fedora's dnf manager is slow by default but you can modify a config file to speed things up.
Zypper came to be in a time when Fedora's/Red Hat's YUM was falling short. Zypper was quite an improvement but then Red Hat surprised us with DNF which was a complete game changer. It's still developed in Python but I think we could have something way better developed in Rust or Go to create the next openSUSE package manager.
I hope you do know of the 'time' command to preface any other command in order to show clock time. It takes the guesswork out of if something is running faster or slower than normal.
Anyway, I've been using openSUSE as my main server for well over 8 years, including a lift and shift P2V of it, and been pleased with everything, including the incorporation of Snapper with Zypper and YaST, if you are using btrfs. A few times it's saved my bacon when an update goes pear shaped and I was back running in the time of another reboot.
Interesting, as far as I have seen the AU/NZ mirrors are pretty fast. I don’t see a major issue with slowness myself.
Zypper kept me from using OpenSuse as a daily driver. I hope they rewrite Zypper to make it a little faster. Great video as always, Matt!
I live in Poland and zypper downloads at max speed.
AGAIN as I've told you in previous video comments, OpenSuSe now has a CDN sponsored mirror, on old installs just do sudo zypper in openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed and it'll automatically reconfigure the main repos over. I got a notable speedup after doing so. The OBS repos wont change so refreshing those will still be kinda slow unfortunately. Hopefully they'll get those moved over as well.
Let's see if you read this this time, fourth time's the charm right? Or is it 5 or 6...
Also, I thought you installed Vivaldi via Distrobox? Why do you still have the Vivaldi repos active?
For some reason zypper has never prompted me to refresh repos manually, it does it auto if needed.
No need to get saucy, I don't see every comment. I will check that out, as I've never heard of it.
As for Vivaldi, I stopped using it through distrobox because they update it too often and it breaks every time there's an update. So I just downloaded it through the repos and then pinned it so it never updates.
Just an update, I already used mirrorsorcerer, which apparently is already instituting the hack you mention.
There's also a snapper plugin for DNF, at least the DNF from the main repo.
I've switched to Linux late last year. I've tried all major distros (and some unusual ones like nixOS) before deciding to go with an Arch based distro. openSUSE tumbleweed on paper was one of the more interesting distros, but in practice I just didn't like it as much as I thought I would. It's idea of a unified configuration management was very appealing to me, but in reality it looked like a half broken, disjointed mashup worse than Windows configs.
When it comes to package managers, nothing comes close to pacman IMO. It's just a joy to use, both for searching and for installing/updating stuff. I don't mind the cryptic flags, because the fish shell both suggests my most used options and supports good help. Worst case scenario that problem is solved with some aliases.
Have you taken a look at sypper?
(strait from opensuse news)
As part of bench marking and prototyping for mirror infrastructure, a new tool was developed, sypper. While its intended purpose is a little bit different, it can be used for pre-downloading packages for zypper. Bench marking shows that it downloads 4-5 times faster by using concurrent downloads and skipping some advanced checks, which zypper does. So check the read-me if you want to experiment with the download speed.
I know it is Open Suh-Sah, but part of me wants me to say Open Susie 😂
Edit: I liked and I already rung the bell, why do you think I am here so early? Lol
i call it open sus e
@@skelebro9999open sussy-e baka. 😅
Fun fact: they made a song about how opensuse is pronunced lol
I used to do that too, back in the old Novel days
Say it however you want. I know how they want it pronounced, but I still pronounce it sue'see' or more accurately, 'SUSE', because that's how it's spelled. It isn't spelled SUSA. If they want it pronounced that way, then they should change it. But SUSE stands for Software und System Entwicklung, (Software and System Development) which is pronounced with an 'E' sound, like 'entertainment'. It's at least a German acronym though, and it's still better than saying Gahnome (Gnome) or Mawtay (MATE) which are pre-existing words. I'm not going to mispronounce words, like an idiot who can't read, just because someone else wants me to say it that way. Those words were already well established, with well defined pronunciations, long before those projects existed.
My wish would be not faster, but more inclusive solution such as Bauh. Then Flatpaks, Appimages and Snaps and rpm packages could all be handled in one interface. You are right though, openSuse is rock solid. Thanks for putting it on our radar.
Zypper is much faster for me, but i am in germany - so probably a mirror issue
SUSE was originally made in Germany, so I think that's the reason
I am living also in Germany and it is faster. But on big gcc update system has updated 1890 packages and it took thirty minutes.
Even in Germany is by far the slowest packages manager, packman and dnf for example they can update the same amount of packages in ten minutes. Is not only the mirrors zypper is really slow also on installation part. But yes if you are leaving for example in China i have heard stories that it could take more than an hour.
SuSE was my fist distribution at the time where you would buy Linux in a box from the bookstore. For me it's biggest flaw is still YaST - it made me search for greener pastures.
Mine was Slackware.
Nowadays yast is 100% optional, i dont even have installed yast on my tumbleweed installation.
There is another reason why pacman is so much faster than anything else. All other distribuitions run a shitload of post-installation scripts. And Opensuse/Suse were always the slowest. Back then when rpm binary was used and it's no different today. I cannot see this changing anytime soon.
Worst thing about OTW is how boring it is. After going through the install I was like “now what?” What kind of rolling release distro just works out of the box, with everything needed already set up? Ridiculous.
No seriously, that’s why I went back to Arch. I thought I was done with tinkering, blowing up my system and doing it all over again, but apparently not. OTW will be my retirement distro when I’m ready to leave that behind.
I actually just think zypper and opensuse's setup is objectively the worst package management out there. There is no autoremove, its unbelievably slow, and removing patterns is basically impossible. I much prefer arch despite it's cryptic ass commands because being able to just -Rns a whole group is amazing. Everytime I try to do something like an autoremove in zypper it tries to remove things I actually want, like tlp, and flatpak for example. I am considering going in and removing all the btrfs partitions except for my home and downloading arch instead XD, only thing really stopping me is secure boot.
I'm a newbie, so my question might be a bit silly, but can I ask, what exactly is autoremove, or removing patterns? I'm just trying to determine whether I personally need to worry about the downsides of zypper. A lot of people, for example, hate package managers that are slow, and call them bad for that. I personally don't care really, as long as it's stable and doesn't cause errors or bugs. I don't care about weird syntax either. Also, secure boot? You mean that it is only available on openSUSE and not Arch?
In my testing zypper wasn't slow for me, im in Australia.
Does Opensuse TW have an easy way to change to nearby fastest mirrors yet?
And then there's Windows Update. Compared to that, Zypper is lightning fast :D (I had Debian installation going at the same time as Zypper zup & Windows Update. Linux was ready way before Windows's simple malicious software removal toolkit update & security update).
In my opinion nix packages would be better overall.
Clear Linux also configures login managers automatically.
Just a shame they barely have any packages now.
Zypper is interesting and sometimes I don't really understand why they did not use DNF like other RPM distros. Though I find using the YaST software manager makes handling most of this easy.
It seems fast enough for me. Being functional and safe is what matters most to me.
I definitely understand that zypper can be slow but I don't think it's that much of a priority, which is probably why it's not a huge focus for the team. Sure it could be faster, but it does the job and you can just sit it in the background while you do other things.
/shrug
I don’t think speed is the key. It is the stability and package dependencies resolution that it takes care of! Just my 2c 😊
Suses biggest flaw: sudo prompts for the root password by default, why choose this weird setting no other distro seems to do it this way? No straight forward way to change network settings from the cli without editing text files or the dreaded yast-gui!
Today there was a 2211 packages updates on my system.
Yeah it took around an hour lol
Heck windows updates are probably faster.
But speed aside opensusa is just great! And hyprland is supported very well, which was the reason i did the switch in the first place, but now i love how stable tumbleweed is while being a rolling release
Interesting I had as many but only took about 10 minutes if that. I live in the UK so guess being close to the mirrors helps.
@@ukdave57 yeah, especially because i have fast internet connection lol
It's crazy though, that zypper is this slow on tumbleweed which get tons of updates every 2 or 3 days. I feel like windows updates are actually faster
Regarding reducing the number of projects at Open Suse:
Wouldn't it be a good thing to shut down the Tumbleweed project in favour of Slowroll now that Leap takes the ALP path? It would also make the effect of Zypper being slow less dominant as updates would only arrive once a month I think. I am not sure how much effort goes into Snowroll at all at the moment, though.
No because Tumbleweed is the upstream for a number of their projects. Tumbleweed is kind of like mainline Fedora in that regard. Slowroll could be considered almost like CentOS. Leap then would be like Alma/Rocky.
No, Slowroll is fundamentally reliant on the existence of Tumbleweed and is basically just the equivalent of Manjaro for OpenSUSE, and there is doubt whether or not Slowroll will even prove to be any more stable than Tumbleweed while increasing the maintenance burden on OpenSUSE as a whole.
Don't do updates on a Tuesday haha wait till Wednesday. The number of times while downloading all the updates a package is replaced with a newer one and no longer available has made me avoid updating on Tuesdays like the plague.
Agreed. Zypper's forces a repo update if you haven't refreshed in the last *ten* minutes. As mentioned, just to search for a package, you have to wait for a minute or two. Ridiculous default (and I couldn't override it with the config file). Also, TW is fun but i had the rollback completely fail when I needed it... couldn't roll back to any snapshot.
You can disable auto refresh for the repos: 'zypper mr -F -a`
@@BenjaminZeller ty but I'd rather the config option worked as documented
@@jayarmstrong Afaik its working exactly as documented ... Wdym?
@@BenjaminZeller last time I tried changing repo.refresh.delay in zypp.conf, it had no effect.
Did you check dnf for Leap also?
For Tumblewed, yes. It's okay, but it misses some things, namely some repos that it can't manage.
@@TheLinuxCast Exactly that what i encounter since you are my mentor i want to make sure. thank you very much!
Ive found Zypper to be slow even compared to DNF. And i have a fast computer. Also found it more complicated when installing new packages. Asks way too many questions compared to dnf/apt/pacman. And at times brings back memories of Dependency Hell
nice reptile on the neofetch where does it come from?
It's the new openSUSE logo. I don't remember where I got the ascii of it
Its more likely that Dnf replaces Zypper on OpenSuse than Zypper is rewritten.
At least there is a timeline and public progress on DNF5.
I think dnf is preferred in one of the immutable spins.
Matt use fedora if you’re complaining so much
On the zypper front, especially on TW rather than Leaf, I only start updates using tmux. That way I can disconnect and come back later.
I Heard this complain quite a lot, but honestly I am not sure how big this is.
I just hit dup and I let it do its thing, I do my work.
I understand that some people are living in the add/remove packages so this might be problematic, but I just don't think it is that much.
At the end of the day , apart from speed , zipper is solid and good. This is of course my use case.
Now about the time it need , I did yesterday a dup , and it had 2GB of packages. Unfortunately I did not keep a timer, but it was not more than 15 minutes.
I will test it though again and post here just for reference .
Feb 6
1,3GB of updates . That took 9 minutes
Serious question...what exactly is people's usecase that they have to use zypper several times a day, everyday? I mean if tinkering around is all you do, sure, then speed is an issue. But for regular people you need zypper to set your system up and then it's like zypper dup once a week and just work with the software you got. It's not like a regular user permanently install or removes packages once they got their system all set up.
Would nix help?
I’ll take any Linux packages manager or update system over what MacOS and Windows do everyday and twice on Sunday.
How much mirrors do needed to be fast, i think that's the equation beside not enabled parallel downloading. Yet it's fair to accept as a trade-off.
Zypper isn't slow, the mirrors are slow, the package manager is actually pretty fast, not as fast as pacman, but faster than apt, plus you can also disable auto refresh of the mirrors by editing the repo file and replacing the 1 with a 0.
Honestly I think apt is the slowest package manager out there. The fact it still doesn't download in parallel is just absurd. An alternate frontend like nala shouldn't be necessary.
DNF's refresh is also extremely slow. It also refreshes way too frequently.
@@Chr0n0s38 And downloading packages is the fastest part of the whole process, once its finished downloading the packages it then goes through and unpacks everything, and then when its finished doing that then it can actually start installing them, its like a three stage process, weird that no one seems to complain about apt being slow though.
@@benjy288 Well I'll be the exception for you lol. Apt is way too slow. I honestly can't bring myself to use Debian based systems just because of how much apt sucks.
This was the very first OS I ever installed on my computer (don't remember which version it was anymore, but it was old). Later I finally got my hands on a Windows XP sp3, but still had no graphics card, and actually Wine on SUSE played Gumboy better than the Windows it was made for 😂! No bs, if anybody would be that dedicated, can check for himself! It's still one of the best distros, but with Gecko being the spinoff that indeed improves everything.
6000 and something files to update. In the 8th hour so far. Even fedora is faster and that’s saying something
your mileage may vary. zypper doesn't do parallel downloads. It readily saturates a ↓ 58,6 Mbit/s ↑ 11,7 Mbit/s connection. Upgraded 3460 packages, some 12GiB altogether in 12 min wall time and 7min 39.850s CPU time.
Not complaining as a distro I’d never swap it. Your figures are right though.
Mirrors are a community effort, although the CDN helped quite a lot with this issue, but the parallel downloads argument is pretty pointless, and developer time would be better spent elsewhere. Likely the reason why it is not actively worked on. If you have the time to measure how long a package manager downloads something you have a lot of free time on your hand that would be better spent elsewhere or you're doing OS maintenance wrong 🙃
`zypper` has probably the best output syntax, and highlighting out of all the package managers I've used. Not like I see it a lot as MicroOS and Aeon are my main systems ^-^
Nobody likes to work on old, boring stuff, and developers are no exception so - like most of the FOSS world - will tend to focus on the "new and shiny" stuff. This is also one of the main reasons why FOSS moves so much faster compared to proprietary software. Considering that we're getting software for free made by volunteers in their free-time I'm perfectly fine with this.
I would argue that our biggest flaw is YaST and shouldn't be installed on a desktop system. It is super redundant.
It's like anytime someone complains about something, we get comments like yours. Almost as if giving criticism somehow draws you out from under your bridge.
Do you not know that zypper is used to install things too, therefore it's more than just about maintaining the system?
And you completely ignore the fact that I said outside the slowness, Zypper is a good package manager. So your points were obviously only half baked if you didn't get through that part of the video, which is silly since I said that at the beginning.
@@TheLinuxCast Considering that I'm a former Board member of openSUSE I would like to point out that my comment wasn't trolling, but a simple reply to your video where you claim that zypper is our biggest flaw to which my reply is simply that it is not. I think you should read my reply once again and better understand it before you make accusations.
> And you completely ignore the fact that I said outside the slowness, Zypper is a good package manager. So your points were obviously only half baked if you didn't get through that part of the video, which is silly since I said that at the beginning.
I did watch your video, thus I was able to make the reply I did. Zypper bothers you so much that you made a video of it.. I mean... yea. And btw I hope the DNF doc worked for you since I was the original author.
Even if it is slow what the big deal is? Just run it during your downtime and don’t worry about it. Are you running it multiple times a day?
So what you're saying is that we should never criticize anything, ever, we should just ignore it because it's out of sight out of mind? Which of course ignores the fact that sometimes, like when you install something, you're going to be sitting waiting for it.
No distro is perfect, just move on
I'll just stop making videos now. Thanks for letting me know.
@@yghhhhrffv
@@TheLinuxCast don’t stop, your videos are great, but I felt like it’s just too much nitpicking on such a minor issue.
Is Zypper made to be deliberately slow for a purpose?
Sorry man, but DNF even with adjustments is still slower than Zypper.
Not for many people in the US it's not..zypper updates are painfully slow here unfortunately
It really depends on where the mirrors are.... for me, dnf is slow than zypper. So, no, zypper is not slow.
It's one of the very few distros I haven't used. Tried several time but the install BS drove me off...
The installer is the best installer around, it just takes a little getting used to.
Try the Scandinavian mirrors
I don't understand why people complain about zypper being slow. Are you that in the hurry somewhere when you use it???
As ever, ' love the linux cast. Awesome stuff, Matt.
When I Sused for 4 years, 20 years ago, I maybe upgraded packages twice. n_n
My 2nd mainstay daily driver was Sabayon, just before it went half binary jank, and source upgrading didn't feel slow, and I upgraded constantly. Heh.
For fun, try spend a day with every utterance of "mirror" or "mirrors" done in a strong Scottish accent. ;) I swear, 90% of your "mirrors" are "meers". Hehehe.
Mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. m' ir rRrRrRrRr ror. mir rRrrRrrRrrRr or. The Scottish technique... If anything, is just fun. But meerkats are fun too. :)
Every RPM package manager is slow.
The new opensus logo is crap. Anyway I only upgrade monthly once because the mirrors are slow. The features of zypper redeem whatever overhead it has compared to other package managers.
Hello, I am a Linux noob. What do you think about MX Linux? Is it better than Opensuse?
MX Linux is based on Debian (and antiX). It's good for less resources computer hardware, and it doesn't use systemd as its init system.
Which one is better? It depends on the user.
I prefer openSUSE or Debian itself.
Why can’t openSUSE just move to pacman?
I suspected this was coming after the glibc update 😂
NO-SUSE is possible while tyhey have so few servers around. Mint has servers even here in Greenland. Cheers!
Can we also mention how awkward it is to type zypper? You might as well just create an alias for it.
I do. in and unin and re and se. Makes it easier to type
I wonder if zypper can just rebase on top of libdnf5 and not tell anybody
Everything is slow in OpenSUSE, they love slow.
zypper is very fast.
When I used opensuse I found zypper to be faster than dnf
How to fix horrible battery life on linux? I am using manjaro. Things that don't really work are tlp, auto cpufreq and power profiles daemon. Powertop does very little help. I just made the dualboot a few days ago.
try something like opensuse or ubuntu instead. arch based distros have way more problems than the enterprise derived ones... this is coming from a gentoo user
@@darthvader1191 yes, I don't want to use x11.
@@AK-fu8ij I had some issue with mint, ubuntu looks like a horrible tablet os, I prefer kde (no, I can't use kubuntu, it does not support dualbooting, too hard to dualboot) and openSUSE has a horribly slow package manager.
Keep in mind I am a new user but I just like arch but it is slightly difficult to install.
@@darthvader1191 yes, I am.
@@bhargavjitbhuyan9394 Kubuntu doesn't support dual-booting? Last time I checked it had an option to automatically use Kubuntu alongside X OS.
I am always surprise how arch's fast to update and 10%'s time's download, 10%'s update, then 80% of the time's dkms driver bullshit, then mkinitcpio then grub update.
Yeah that's mostly due to pacman not using as many post-install scripts.
Why the rush ? Zypper always gives an opportunity to create a quality cup of coffee or to enjoy a proper toilet break. 😉
I use Arch btw xD
I wanted to give you a car for me to tell you that Susan put in your other videos. You said it was slow I want bro and blah blah blah but I use it for two years now and I don’t have a problem with it installed everything that I want and if you want to have all that so I hope you have a good day.
I mean ur not a real Linux user if u don't use lfs 😂
I'd say that about Slackware. Installing was a pain, upgrading was much worse. I've broken just about every Slackware install due to some dependency related issue. I may install it on a virtual machine to see if it has improved since I last used it.
Ubuntu BTW
mears = mirrors