Published Apr 1, 2026, 4:30 PM EDT
Roine Bertelson is a Stockholm-based tech writer, translator, and digital strategist with more than twenty years of hands-on experience in AI tools, Linux, consumer tech, cybersecurity, and SEO-driven content. He's known for turning complex topics into clear and practical guidance that helps readers solve real problems. People trust his work because he actually uses and tests the tools he writes about, breaks things on purpose, and translates the chaos of modern technology into advice that feels human, honest, and useful.
There’s a very specific kind of irritation (if anyone's interested, I call it penguin-rage) that comes from watching a Linux update crawl. Not fail, not crash, or even complain. Just sit there, inching forward like it’s negotiating each package individually. My system wasn’t broken. The internet was solid. Streaming, downloads, Docker pulls, all fine. But the moment I ran apt update followed by apt upgrade. Everything slowed to a polite, almost passive-aggressive pace. Like Linux was saying, “We’ll get there … eventually.” And for the longest time, I just accepted it. Because updates are supposed to take time, right? Spoiler warning: No, they’re not.
The problem wasn’t my system
Slow updates were caused by a poor mirror choice
Credit: Roine Bertelson/MakeUseOf
Linux doesn’t download updates from one central server. It pulls from mirrors, which are copies of the same packages hosted all over the world. In theory, this is great. Redundancy, speed, resilience. Very clever. In practice, your system quietly picks one and hopes for the best.
Sometimes you get lucky and land on a fast, local mirror that feels instant. Other times, you end up stuck with something halfway across the planet that’s either overloaded, underpowered, or just having a bad day. And your system will happily keep using it forever, like it’s in a long-term relationship. That’s what happened to me. Nothing looked wrong. No errors or warnings. Plainly, updates that took far longer than they had any right to. The worst part is how subtle it is. You don’t immediately think, “This is broken.” You think, “I guess this is just how long updates take.” It isn’t.
I switched mirrors and everything changed
A better server made updates dramatically faster
The fix was almost offensively simple. I switched to a better mirror. On Linux Mint and Ubuntu-based systems, this is baked right into the system settings. No terminal rituals required, no forum spelunking, no copy-pasting commands from a 2012 blog post.
- Open Software Sources
- Find the Download from or Mirror section
- Let it test mirrors or manually pick one close to you
- Apply and refresh
That’s it. That’s the “tweak.” I hit update again, fully expecting a mild improvement at best. Instead, it just … went. Packages started flying in, as if my system had finally woken up and remembered it had a decent internet connection. Same machine, same network, and same updates, but a completely different experience. It felt less like optimizing and more like removing a limiter that had no business being there in the first place.
I also enabled parallel downloads
Letting APT multitask removes unnecessary waiting
Once I saw how much the mirror made a difference, I got curious. Because if one small setting could fix that much, what else was hiding in plain sight? Turns out, APT is conservative by default, so it does not always use the most aggressive download behavior. Queue up, wait your turn, no pushing.
Which is great if you’re trying to be considerate on a shared mirror. Less great if you just want your system to update before your coffee gets cold. So I nudged it a bit.
You can enable more aggressive download behavior by tweaking APT’s config. For example:
Acquire::Queue-Mode "host";
Acquire::Retries "3";And depending on your setup, adjusting the pipeline depth or allowing multiple connections can help it fetch more efficiently, rather than doing everything in a neat little line.
I also added:
Acquire::Languages "none";Because I don’t need my system downloading translation files for languages I don’t speak just to feel culturally complete.
The result wasn’t as dramatic as switching mirrors, but combined, it shaved off even more time. Updates stopped feeling like a task and started feeling like a background event. Which is exactly where they belong.
Why Linux doesn’t do this by default
The system favors stability and shared resources
Before we start accusing Linux of intentionally wasting our time, there is a reason for this. Mirrors are shared infrastructure. If every machine suddenly decided to hammer them with aggressive parallel downloads, things would get messy fast. So distributions play it safe. Conservative defaults. Predictable behavior. No unnecessary strain on shared servers. It’s the same philosophy behind many Linux decisions. Stability first, performance second, chaos optional. But the trade-off is that your system might be running with training wheels long after you actually need them. Especially if you’re on a decent connection and updating a personal machine, not maintaining a fleet of servers in a data center somewhere.
Related
Fixing updates removed a subtle but constant source of friction
Here’s the part I didn’t expect. My system didn’t feel slow before. Not in any obvious way. Apps launched fine. Multitasking was smooth. Nothing screamed “performance issue.” But every time updates rolled around, there was this low-level friction. That feeling of “ugh, this is going to take a while.” It added just enough resistance to make system maintenance feel like something to avoid. Fixing the mirror and then pushing APT to behave a bit less like a queue at the post office removed that entirely.
Now updates happen quickly enough that I don’t think about them. I run them, they finish, and I move on with my life. No mental overhead, no waiting game, no quiet resentment building in the background. And that’s when it clicked. Sometimes your system isn’t slow. It’s just being unnecessarily polite. And all it takes is one small setting to tell it, it’s allowed to be a little faster.