IT Random Stuff

Updated in 2026 with extra notes for Ubuntu, Debian, home servers and homelabs. apt-get is reliable, but package downloads can feel slow on some Ubuntu and Debian systems. If you run a Linux laptop, VPS, old workstation or home server, you have probably typed this many times: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade The update process itself is not always the slow part. Very often, the slow part is downloading packages during installs and upgrades, especially when there are many packages or when your mirror is not very fast. One simple way to improve that download step is apt-fast . apt-fast is a shell script wrapper for apt-get and aptitude . It can speed up package downloads by using parallel downloads and multiple connections per package. This does not make every part of APT faster. It does not speed up package unpacking, dependency solving or post-install scripts. But when the bottleneck is downloading packages, apt-fast can help. apt-fast is useful when downlo...