openSUSE's Biggest Flaw

Today I talk about openSUSE's biggest flaw and why it makes such a good distro a little worse.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

===== Follow us 🐧🐧 ======

==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====

==== Referenced =====

==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
1:12 WTF is Zypper?
2:30 Could Be Better, A Lot Better
2:54 Counting the Ways Zypper is Slow
2:57 Mirrors
5:49 It Gets Even Slower
8:32 This is the Biggest Flaw
8:57 Solutions...delete that... work arounds
10:03 Fixing with Fedora's DNF
14:11 DNF the Official Package Manager of openSUSE?
20:19 Wrapping Up

#ramble #opensuse #thelinuxcast

[DownunderPhx]

As someone who uses Gentoo, I can tell you that Zypper is not the slowest package manager.

[ayushmanbt]

“it went faster as I was recording “ - the classic… love for that

[jamesburndred]

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. 😄

[shawnaltman]

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!

[xruptordarkwater]

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.

[courtneymertz]

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!

[decivox]

Looking forward to hearing your DNF5 long term experience. Zyppers slowness is my main complaint

[freelancetravels]

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!

[cejannuzi]

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.

[vnight]

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.

[ASilverNMeep]

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.

[martynlewis]

It's down to your mirrors, when I do a zypper ref, it takes about 1.5 - 2 seconds.

[tonytwostep_]

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.

[byronbrimstone]

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?

[PremiumGerman]

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

[yurtlew]

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.

[nonyabusiness-fe]

"i just like trolling people because its fun"

truer words have never been spoken.

[donkey]

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.

[VeitLehmann]

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?

[tuliomfable]

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.