The author combined fetch and install, which is just silly. Fetch times are affected by any number of things, such as the number of mirrors the package repos h

The author combined fetch and install, which is just silly. Fetch times are affected by any number of things, such as the number of mirrors the package repos have, whether you have a mirror near you, whether your system is configured to use it, and your current connection speed. Both fetch and install are useful to know, but for very different reasons. Only so much of fetch speed is in control of the distro setting it up (but you can set up your own mirror if you like...), but install speed once the files are already staged locally is also useful to know. Additionally, whether the package manager keeps a local cache of metadata for packages, and whether it checks and updated it every request or only at certain intervals or when requested will affect this as well (and is very important, if you want to know about security updates immediately and not after some interval of hours). What the author has done is the equivalent to testing how fast certain one mile and 10 mile stretches of highway are, but without controlling for time of day, and not realizing rush hour is invalidating all the results. The first step to measuring something is to learn about what you're measuring so you can avoid issues like these.