Flatpaks aren’t huge at all. This is a debunked myth. I can’t recommend reading this article enough.
So you only need to use two technologies that add complexity and cost performance (filesystem compression and deduplication) to get to the point where you are still 10+% higher in disk space use? I am not sure your post supports the argument it is trying to make.
Author here. The distro comes with the filesystem compression and deduplication already set up and I don’t need to manage it, so of course I’m going to use it.
Given the cost of storage I have no problems spending a barely noticeable amount of space to use flatpaks given all the problems they solve.
Deduplications comes with flatpak for free. Both systems had filesystem compression, so this one doesn’t count. 10% higher disk space is neglectible on most systems and the containerisation makes it worth it.
Compression often improves performance as it means reading less data from storage. Deduplication, as flatpak uses it, is free.
If I had to suffer only having 600GB of free disk space instead of 640GB of free disk space I’d shoot myself
My take: native packages for the core OS, flatpaks for desktop applications. Works for me.
I only resort to using container formats if native packages aren’t available.
Fair enough, but I like the fact that I can keep Firefox or Steam from accessing my bank records and holiday photos.
But it occupies a freaking crazy amount of space. People do really be on drugs when going with these religious strong stances.
The issue with flat packs is the more you use it, the higher the chance that you get less shared runtimes and the higher the chance of the duplication. And at some points it really does get to awfully ridiculous levels.
A while back, I had run everything I possibly could with Flatpak to the point I’d even make my own Flatpak to try and see how well it would work. Instead of using the AUR. And it worked great for the first little while. I’d installed all of my apps and it was fine, but as I kept using the system, kept installing new apps and not uninstalled the old ones, it really started to build up awfully quick, especially with older apps.
I feel like the usefulness of flatpaks is the inverse parabola, where it’s extremely useful in the center use, but when you go to either side of it, it becomes less and less useful.
Apologies for any incoherentcy this was written with a speech 2 text.
even on a 64GB (space, not RAM) machine, I would use a flatpak centric installation. The 1GB difference isn’t really that important, imo.
To me it is. 1gb itself isn’t so bad, but I have a handful of things I could save 1gb on, so I do it for all when it works suitably for me.
Maybe I’m in the wrong here but I would think focusing on management time for Flatpak vs whatever would be the important part, not disk space usage.
No, you’re right but people keep saying that space is a concern when thinking about flatpak. This article clearly shows that that’s not an issue.
Gotcha, I didn’t realize the author was just driving another nail into that coffin.
Can’t wait to have containers for containers.
I legitimately think that people in the community are stupid enough to see value in something like that.
Wait til you find out how Steam works
I’ve been trying to wean myself off Steam for awhile now.
I just use it for games I already own on it and games that require Steam, like TF2.
That’s great and all, but Steam still solved their issues of having a stable gaming platform on a bunch of distros by nesting virtualization and runtimes
