Linux Mint Aims For More Reliable & Faster Repository Access

Linux Mint is working on providing "ultra fast" repositories for users obtaining system updates and installing new packages on this popular desktop Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu.

Linux Mint is working on boosting the performance of their package repositories by using a content delivery network (CDN) via Fastly. This should be a big improvement over their current infrastructure where right now their package server is hosted just in Chicago. With pushing out their repositories to the Fastly CDN, their CDN is distributed around the world.

By leveraging the Fastly CDN, the package repositories should see much faster response times, more consistent speeds, and higher availability than their current repository server setup. Fastly also supports the repository access via HTTPS.

Linux Mint just launched a beta test of their Fastly CDN setup. During this beta period users wanting to try out the faster repositories will need to change their APT sources location from packages.linuxmint.com to fastly.linuxmint.io. If/when everything pans out and they use Fastly by default, they will be pointing packages.linuxmint.com to the Fastly CDN and thus no user intervention will be required at that point. More details on Linux Mint's Fastly CDN testing for their repositories via this issue tracker.