One of the criticisms people have with containerizing their desktop apps is the "insane amount of space for their environment" that people think it requires. That's a direct quote from a reddit post on the topic from today.
Let's have a look
Today I'll compare two desktops, one will be
Flatpaks aren’t huge at all. This is a debunked myth. I can’t recommend reading this article enough.
I am confused a little. The space taken by silver blue increased by around 3 gigs but the space taken by workstation increased by 4 gigs. So flatpak actually resulted in less space being used the apps. Is this some sort of faulty space usage reporting¿?
Flatpak shares runtimes (and files) between downloads. A lot of what would otherwise be considered dependencies are part of the base runtimes many Flatpak images use.
As a result, a 5kB Flatpak image on its own may cause gigabytes of downloads, but adding a fully featured operating system with image and photo editors may only be a couple of hundred megabytes more than that.
Mixing Flatpak and traditional packaging is always the worst, because you’ll probably end up with duplicates, but going full Flatpak or full package manager should barely make a difference.
In return of the ±10% additional disk space used, you do get a lot of extra features that traditional distros aren’t able to provide.
There is one exception: the Nvidia runtimes. They’re downloading hundreds of megabytes with each update, ignoring deduplication, because of a previous copyright issue with distributing Nvidia’s drivers (I believe Nvidia allows you to redistribute their drivers now, but I think Flatpak just hasn’t caught up). It doesn’t help that one of the members of the Nvidia-Flatpak packaging team has made the (right, tbh) decision to no longer use Nvidia so the solution may take a while.
Are runtimes from the fedora flatpaks remote used by apps that are downloaded from flathub¿? Because the gnome apps that are installed by default in silver blue are from fedora flatpak remote so I am guessing the runtimes are also from the same remote
I am confused a little. The space taken by silver blue increased by around 3 gigs but the space taken by workstation increased by 4 gigs. So flatpak actually resulted in less space being used the apps. Is this some sort of faulty space usage reporting¿?
Flatpak shares runtimes (and files) between downloads. A lot of what would otherwise be considered dependencies are part of the base runtimes many Flatpak images use.
As a result, a 5kB Flatpak image on its own may cause gigabytes of downloads, but adding a fully featured operating system with image and photo editors may only be a couple of hundred megabytes more than that.
Mixing Flatpak and traditional packaging is always the worst, because you’ll probably end up with duplicates, but going full Flatpak or full package manager should barely make a difference.
In return of the ±10% additional disk space used, you do get a lot of extra features that traditional distros aren’t able to provide.
There is one exception: the Nvidia runtimes. They’re downloading hundreds of megabytes with each update, ignoring deduplication, because of a previous copyright issue with distributing Nvidia’s drivers (I believe Nvidia allows you to redistribute their drivers now, but I think Flatpak just hasn’t caught up). It doesn’t help that one of the members of the Nvidia-Flatpak packaging team has made the (right, tbh) decision to no longer use Nvidia so the solution may take a while.
Are runtimes from the fedora flatpaks remote used by apps that are downloaded from flathub¿? Because the gnome apps that are installed by default in silver blue are from fedora flatpak remote so I am guessing the runtimes are also from the same remote
Maybe because silverblue already had a runtime installed