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.
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.
is there an option to disable DNF syncing and checking the latency of the mirrors every time?
dnf --cacheonlyIt 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 Repositories are only synced if the local cache is out of date or the metadata timestamp has changed.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.