mintupdate should automatically chose the best mirrors

Silejonu commented 2 years ago

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Most users have to manually change the mirrors if they want decent download speeds for their upgrades. Beginners have absolutely no idea what a mirror even is, and since the mirrors get reset after an Linux Mint version upgrade, some users end up using mirrors from the other side of the world without realising it. Worse, when a mirror malfunctions, they may be rendered with no way to update their system.

Describe the solution you'd like This should be done automatically, as there is no reason to want a slower or broken mirror. Something similar to Reflector on Arch Linux would be a good thing: a script that runs every x amount of time, filters the most recent mirrors, and picks the fastest.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Make this an opt-in/opt-out option in the updater settings.
At the very least, make the "Do you want to use local mirrors? Yes/No" banner more meaningful. For instance: "Your download speed is slow, please switch to a faster mirror by clicking here."

Additional context This suggestion comes from my experience of installing Linux Mint for dozens of absolute beginners as part of my daily job. This issue has been a recurring annoyance, and one of the main things holding users back from being autonomous in their computer usage. It has discouraged users from updating their system as they missed the cryptic pop-up, and ended up with an unbearably slow updating process.

ronyAhmed1200 commented 2 years ago

I completely agree with it. and also pls add some fastest speed mirrors like evowise.cdn. bcz it is really boring and hard to update using slower mirrors bcz i don't have 30 minutes to update packages..

Gnomasz commented 2 years ago

In support of the feature request I'd like to point out that it would solve reported issues like e.g. https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2180111#p2180111 I'd like to add to the Describe the solution you'd like section: Alternative mirrors are searched in case mintUpdate (or mintinstall) fails to fetch a package from the currently selected mirror.

coledapcnerd commented 1 year ago

As a stopgap solution, there could be a button on the local mirrors prompt to “Pick the best mirrors for me”. Could have it do the same speed test for each mirror as it currently exists in the mirror options, just without any user input and simply picks the fastest one.

linuxmint / mintupdate

mintupdate should automatically chose the best mirrors #715