20 April 2026
Nala is faster than apt
Nala does two things that apt doesn’t and maintains compatibility with the familiar existing commands.
The first thing it does, and the thing you want to do right after installing it is nala fetch. What the fetch command does is is finds the mirrors that are fastest for you and allows you to select multiple mirrors to download from.
The second thing it does, is it downloads more than one package at a time, it will try up to 3 concurrent downloads per mirror, as well as running downloads from multiple mirrors simultaneously. The 3 package limit is a throttle to prevent it from overwhelming mirrors. Apt only downloads 1 item at a time as a result Nala is much faster on the download portions of install, and apt update benefits as well.
Nala is in the repos for Trixie (Debian) and Questing Quagga (Ubuntu). On older releases you’ll need to install it directly.
For documentation and alternate install see: Nala’s Github Page.