Comment 44 for bug 875343

I apologize if this is off topic, my intent is to help, and offer something that may be a work around.

During an upgrade from 18.1 Mate to 18.2 Mate, I got caught in “Saving installed packages” too.

Pixy Yuan (pixy-bupt) #41 is right, delete everything but /home by way of sudo’ed file browser. I also delete most .xxx files - if you keep .remmina and the like - you don’t have to re-invent the wheel, but get rid of the standard system hidden files in /home/username/

Install shifted into copying files directly. No wait. Full Mate install in under 10 minutes on a Dell Lattitude D610 - Pentium M single core 1.1 gig CPU

I thank my friend Jason for showing me this, many years ago, and wanted to share. NOTE - I did not have /var in a custom spot, thus the apology in the first line.

Brad