 I have been using OpenSUSA now for over 200 days and if you watched my channel for any amount of time during those 200 plus days, you've no doubt heard me talk about how awesome OpenSUSA is. Over and over and over and over again, I've talked about how much I've fallen in love with OpenSUSA. I've shown off my sticker, which is there. Once again, you guys can tell that I've become a bit of a fanboy when it comes to OpenSUSA. I think it's a fantastic Linux distribution and I've even called it the best Linux distribution out there. I've made fun of other people who don't use OpenSUSA, although I don't really care what you use. I just like trolling people because it's fun. Overall, OpenSUSA is a fantastic distribution and I've talked about it over and over again. I've sung its praises, become a fanboy, all of those things. But you've never heard me talk about it as a perfect distribution. I've never called it perfect. I never will because there's not a perfect distribution that exists. There's just not one out there that is perfect. OpenSUSA is not an exception to that rule. OpenSUSA has flaws. What I want to do today is talk about one of its major flaws, maybe its biggest flaw. That is zipper. Let's talk about that. But before we do, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it. If you haven't already, hit the subscribe button because it would help the channel and it would mean you get more awesome Linux content like this. Hashtag YouTuber. Anyway, I don't know why I do the hashtag YouTuber every time. It doesn't matter. Anyways, zipper is the package manager for OpenSUSA. If you've ever used OpenSUSA before, think of it like apt or Pacman or DNF. It's basically the equivalent of that but on OpenSUSA. And compared to those other package managers, I would say that zipper is a very good package manager. It has the vast majority of features all of those other package managers have. And it has very good syntax. It has a ton of really cool features in terms of searching and abbreviations that you can use so you don't have to, you know, spell out the entire command all the time. It does very good. I would say that it's better in some ways than Pacman. Pacman used to be my favorite package manager. But Pacman is not an intuitive package manager because they use really weird flags and stuff like that that you don't know what they mean and all that stuff. And it takes some while to get used to. Zippers not like that. It uses very standard syntax, things like search and install and stuff like that. Very similar to apt or DNF in that case. So I would say zipper is a very good package manager. But as I said, I also think that it's OpenSUSA's biggest flaw. Why would I say that? It's because it's slow. Zipper is a very, very slow package manager compared to all the others. It's by far the slowest. It's not even really a competition. Now, when you talk about slowness, you have to think about what do you mean slow mat? What do you what do you mean when you say that it's slow? Well, zipper is slow in two areas. First is mirrors. So zipper is slow when it comes to the usage of OpenSUSA's mirrors. Now, this may be a zipper problem, or it's a mirror problem. I'm going to lean towards the latter. Now, OpenSUSA, as an organization, does have a lot of mirrors scattered around the world. Maybe not as many as Arch or Debian or whatever, but they have a lot of mirrors scattered around the world. So you can find mirrors that are close to you chances are. But it doesn't matter how close you are to a mirror, it's still going to be slow. Now, I don't know if this has to do again with zipper, or it has to do with the fact that they have really slow internet at all of their mirror sites, or if there's some kind of efficiency thing that they got going on where it just doesn't actually send data out as fast as it possibly could, the mirrors are slow. And you'll know this every time you go into your OpenSUSA install and do a refresh. So I have this alias to RE and it's going to ask me for my password and you guys can just see how slow it is to actually refresh the mirrors. So this is the equivalent of doing apt update on Ubuntu or Debian, things like that. Or you can do that on Fedora as well. This is basically doing the same thing. And the problem, one of the problems with this process here, and this is actually going a little bit faster than normal, is that over time, as you use OpenSUSA more and more, you're going to be adding more and more repositories, which means this process here actually gets slower, the longer you use OpenSUSA, because it has more repositories to actually use. Now, there are a few things you can do to speed this up. You can use things like mirror sourcer to actually speed this up. But overall, that process is fairly slow. And honestly, like I said, this time, because of course, I'm recording it, and it knew I was watching, it went faster than it normally does. But this process here is slow. And it's because the mirrors themselves are slow, I believe. I don't think it has much to do with Zipper itself. But you see this every time you use Zipper. And the biggest issue here, in terms of mirrors, isn't that they're slow, which is it is an issue. But I don't think it's the biggest one. The biggest one is that Zipper constantly refreshes these things and not always when it has to. So things like if you just wanted to do a search for a package of some sort using Zipper search, it would want you to refresh the mirrors before you were actually able to do the search. The odd thing there is that it doesn't actually refresh the mirrors for you. It tells you to go do it separately. But it still goes through all the mirrors. It's very weird in that situation. But you get the idea, every time it asks you to refresh those mirrors, it takes times and it does that often. Like for every Zipper command, basically, it's going to tell you, especially if it has to interact with those mirrors in any way, it's going to tell you that it needs to be refreshed. And it has to do this multiple times a day. And that slows Zipper down quite a bit. But it's not the biggest area where Zipper is slow. Earlier, I mentioned there was two areas where Zipper was slow. The second one is when it comes to downloading the packages themselves. So if you're going to download something from Zipper, and you know, you're performing an update, you're going to notice the one thing that it doesn't do is parallel downloads. Zipper doesn't have the ability to do parallel downloads. It hasn't ever had that that capability as far as I'm aware. And it doesn't have it right now for sure. They have been working on it, which is good news. The bad news is that they've been working on it since 2016. Now, I'm no math whiz, but 2016 was a fair bit of time ago. And that's a little bit worrying if you're looking forward to this feature, because I don't think that's ever going to come. Now there are some side projects, people trying to rewrite Zipper completely, you know, either in Rust or in other languages to try to make it faster to enable parallel downloads and other cool features. But those projects are all usually done by one person. Some of them are maintained. Some of them are not maintained. Most if not all of them are unfinished. So all of our hopes and eggs are in one basket when it comes to trying to get this feature, because it needs this feature, parallel downloads are important. Just ask the arch guys. So for the longest time, Pac-Man did not have parallel downloads. And then it did once they received parallel downloads as a feature, and they enable it, everyone who used arch was wondering why they didn't have that to begin with. It was a very good feature for them to add, you can basically download as many packages as you want, as many packages as your internet will be able to handle. And it makes Pac-Man just tremendously faster because it can download many packages at once. It's a very good feature, but zipper doesn't have it. And that means that downloads them one by one by one, and it can only start the next one. Once the last one has been finished. And it makes zipper phenomenally slow when it comes to downloading packages. And on top of that, it's also slow. And I didn't really, I didn't mention this is the third part, but it's also slow when installing packages. So I don't think that that's unique to zipper. Most package managers are the slowest when it comes to actually installing the packages. But when you add it on top of the mirrors being slow, so it refreshes all the mirrors when you do an update. So it'll do that, it'll do that slowly. When it downloads them, it'll download them one at a time and it do that slowly because again, the mirrors are slow. And then it's slow to install them. So it's a triple whammy. It's a very, very slow package manager. So this is by far the biggest flaw of open Suza. It's not even a argument in my opinion, I think that you could ask any open Suza user out there, no matter how long they've been using open Suza. And they all tell you that the biggest flaw is probably zipper. And it's a shame because like I said, I think that overall it's a good package manager, it just has this one huge mungus flaw that ruins everything. So there are solutions to this problem, obviously the main one being that they finally add parallel downloads to zipper, and they make it work. Now I've heard that they're basically rewriting zipper from the bottom up. And that's what's taking so long. I don't know if they're continuing to work on that project, or if it's just something that they work on from time to time, or if they've completely abandoned the idea of fixing it. I don't know what's going on there. I've read there's a whole thread on the zipper GitHub, or the get zipper get page, where they basically talked about this feature for forever, basically since 2016. So I don't know what the actual status of it is right now. I'm hoping that eventually that it will come hopefully sometime within the next two years while I'm still using open Suza. But I wouldn't hold my breath that that's going to be the solution. It's the solution that should happen. It's the one that we should definitely hope should happen. But because it's been worked on for so long. I don't think that it's either ever going to happen or it's going to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, I think that that's just the case. The other options for this is if you want to fix it now is to use something like DNF and you can in fact install DNF and use DNF which is fedora's package manager on open Suza because both fedora and open Suza are RPM based distributions. So you can use the same package manager on both if you want. I'm sure you probably can use zipper on on fedora. I don't know why you'd want to but you probably could. For sure you can use DNF on open Suza. It's not even all that hard. It's just a couple commands you install DNF you install DNF plugins and it just basically works. There are instructions on the open Suza wiki. So if you wanted to find out how to do that, you can find it out easily. Basically what it does though is it allows you to use DNF and DNF of course supports parallel downloads. Now DNF itself is not the fastest package manager in the world. It's probably one of the slowest. In fact, I'd say if you were ranking the slowest package managers out there zippers obviously number one DNF is probably number two at least DNF for right. So using DNF isn't going to save the world. It's not going to speed up your your updates and installs so much that you're going to save all this time but it is definitely faster than zipper. You can also however install DNF five. Now DNF five is not a finished project. It's not actually released to the wider fedora world but you can install it on open Suza and you can use it on open Suza. Now I have been doing this now for a couple days. I used DNF before that before I installed DNF five and it is phenomenally faster. It's just insane. So yesterday I wish I'd recorded this because it would have just kind of been really good b-roll for this video but yesterday I had 547 updates when I did an update on my system. If I were to have used zipper to do that like I normally would if I use pseudo zipper depth to actually do a system update, it probably would have taken close to 30 minutes maybe 35 minutes to actually do that it would have refreshed the mirrors. It would have downloaded all the packages one by one by one and then it would have installed them and ran all the post installation scripts and all the stuff that it would normally do. It would have taken about again about 30 to 35 minutes with DNF five it took less than five. That's the difference, right? So if you're going if you're using open Suza I highly recommend using DNF five as the package manager but and here's a big one you're going to have to listen to me on this if you're going to do this make sure you pay attention to everything that's going on you're going to want to watch those updates because DNF is not the package manager of open Suza. It's just not and it doesn't have the built in compatibility with all the stuff that opens Suza does like zipper does because zipper is the package manager and it has all the stuff. So the thing that I've found the most is that oftentimes when you use zipper you get errors when it comes to things like packages changing to different mirrors and all the stuff things that you would have to interact with in order to fix those errors. Usually it's not that big a deal usually it's just approving the idea that you know a package moves from this mirror to this mirror or from this repository to that repository whatever with DNF it just ignores all those errors. It just goes right through them and I'm assuming it doesn't tell you I'm assuming that just it encounters those choices and it makes the choice for you whatever choice it considers best right. There is an option to do that in zipper as well as I'm assuming that they've just kind of correlated that option in zipper which is allow vendor change into DNF so that kind of makes those choices for you. That's fine but it worries me just a little bit because I want to make those choices myself for the most part. I want to have some control over that to make sure I know where packages are going and if they're going to not be installed or if they're going to break things. I want the choice. So there are some downsides to using DNF and DNF five on open Suza. I don't know if those downsides will be ugly as I go forward using them or not. I haven't used it for long enough to be able to tell you for sure. But the speed I think is going to be worth it because it is so much faster. So I made this argument on mastodon the other day where I talked about how I think that open Suza should can seriously consider just using DNF as their package manager. Now this is a hot take as you would say it in the open Suza sphere because a lot of people like zipper. I'm one of those people who like zipper. I like that it has the open Suza has its own package manager. I think it should that way doesn't rely on the fedora project or red hat or whatever for their package manager. I think that that'd probably a bad thing. But when it comes to speed and usability DNF is superior to zipper in almost every fashion. And because of that I'm very jealous of it. And I've thought over and over again how nice open Suza would be if it just used DNF as its default package manager. And I argued about this on mastodon for a little while. And I've come down to the idea is that I do think that it's something that they can should consider in the long term. But I don't think that they should go that way to be honest with you even though I think that it's something that they should talk about. And the reason I think that they should talk about it because I think it would spur conversation over how bad zipper actually is in terms of speed. I think that that's a conversation that opens Suza actually needs to have because it's something that everyone experiences. It makes yes really really slow because yes is just a front end and uses zipper for a lot of the things that yes does. And if you've ever used yes before you'll know that in certain situations it is phenomenally slow. And the reason why it's phenomenally slow is because zipper is laying in the back end being really really slow. So I think that this is a conversation that the open Suza community needs to have because it needs to be fixed. Now I don't think that it is a priority for the developers open Suza. Unfortunately. And one of the reasons why is because they have their focus set on other things. If you go to the open Suza website you'll see that they have approximately eight different distros that they actually support. They have leap and tumble weed and they have two or three remutable distros and they have several other ones that they have that are different flavors of those distributions that exist. They have many different ISOs that they have to maintain every time they do an update. And I've talked about this before with other distros you know Oracle Linux and Linux Mint and several others that just kind of seem to have a situation where they're dividing their focus into too many different places. And I think the open Suza has done this they have unfortunately they have they have divided their focus into too many different areas when it comes to providing different distributions and they're basically providing many different distributions that have different release schedules different support schedules different layouts and package managers and all that stuff because some of their immutable stuff don't use zipper at all they use different different you know you know so they have all that stuff to maintain and zippers kind of the old thing so it's not getting the attention that you know likely would if it was the only thing. And I think that that's kind of the situation we find ourselves in is the open Suza developers have turned their attention to the new shiny stuff and zipper is going to just languish in the background it's why the parallel download things just kind of hasn't happened or you know maybe they have one or two people working on it whereas before you know if they didn't have all of these separate projects they could dedicate some of the stuff to making what they already have better and faster. This is my problem with open Suza in a nutshell is that they have the same kind of problem that Arco Linux has that Linux Mint has that Manjaro has in some ways where instead of focusing on just one ISO one distribution that they can just kind of push out and perfect as much as possible they've divided their tension into too many different places and that means that their distros that are overall very good do suffer in some areas with open Suza that area is with their package manager it's just the place where it suffers the most because the rest of it is really good I really I can't talk enough about how stable this distribution has been it's a rolling release distro and it should has no business being as stable as it has been and it's just been phenomenally good when it comes to stability and it's in breakability unbreakability uh I don't the word there's completely completely flew over my head I'm sure in breakability is not actually a word but it should be a word in my inability to break it it has completely surprised me because I do weird things on my system all the time like the other day I uninstalled plasma and when you want to install plasma it tends to take a lot of stuff with it open Suza handled that like a dream it even changed to a different display manager by itself without telling me I had to do it because it uninstalled SDDM because of course it did and it just switched it and on any other distribution you uninstall SDDM because you uninstalled plasma and you didn't realize you uninstalled SDDM it's just going to take you to a TTY no other distribution than I know of at least we'll just do that for you that's awesome open Suza does this kind of stuff where it's kind of if you make a mistake or you do something really weird it kind of covers it up and tries to fix it for you now obviously it's not perfect there have been situations where I've done stupid and I've had to roll back for whatever reason using a butterfest snapshot but it's overall been fantastic and it disappoints me constantly that it feels like the main product of open Suza which should be tumbleweed has kind of fallen by the wayside in some cases specifically when it comes to package management and you know it's just one of those things that I have to kind of live with and it's fine but I'm just kind of disappointed I'm not mad I'm disappointed as the way I should put it I'm I am glad that dnf5 and dnf are available on open Suza and that you can use them it's a good work around I said I don't know how stable that's going to be long term but I'm happy that those things exist to kind of cover up the fact that zipper is probably going to be slow for ever and ever which is just again very disappointing so that's the biggest flaw with open Suza in the next few days I'm going to be talking about the five things I like most about open Suza I don't know when that video will actually go up but I'm going to record that video very soon so that'll be something to look forward to if you are interested in that kind of thing you can leave a comment in the comment section below make sure you subscribe and all that stuff so you can follow me on masters on our odyssey those links will be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast you can also support me on kofi and on youtube with the little join button down there if you want to help support me monetarily if you want to get something back for your money I do have a store where you can get some awesome merch you can go there at shop.thelinuxcast.org there you'll find desk mats and hats and hoodies and t-shirts and there's a there's a poster kind of like the one behind me although without the without the subscribe button on it so if you want to get some merch and support the channel you can do that shop.thelinuxcast.org thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel just would not be anywhere near where it is right now so thank you so very very much for your support I truly again do appreciate it so very much thanks everybody for watching I hope you have a wonderful day and week or weekend or wherever I actually post this video and I'll see you next time