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.
I feel like they assumed people were familiar with flatpak.
But one big problem is software availability and distribution. Developers don’t care to make a version for every distro and keep it up to date. That’s work that distro repo packagers need to do. And that’s a shitload of work, divided between loads of distros and their repos. For user the effect from this would be that an app might not get updates very quickly or that the app simply isn’t in the repo. Flatpak solves this in that developer (or someone) can make a flatpak of the app and it’s easily available to everyone. Cuts down a ton of work and improves app availability for users.
What’s the use case where storage is at enough of a premium to matter? None of this is targeting a server where you’re getting silly with optimizing storage, and even the smallest storage on most consumer facing hardware is filled by media one way or another. It straight up doesn’t matter to a reasonable end user. Storage is less than dirt cheap.
Ah yes. The mindset of: I have lots of money to spend on storage, so we shouldn’t care about optimisation for less fortunate users.
No, the mindset that the storage is less than pennies worth and this usage would have to explode massively to even approach negligible.
A device that is affected in any way by a GB of storage space is going to choke on 50 other things way before you get to that.
I have over a decade old used and and beat up laptop. Even that had enough space that the extra space use from flatpak was never an issue.
I feel like you’re being a bit too dramatic here. Even old as shit laptops and desktops aren’t so space starved that flatpak use would he a huge issue.
But it occupies a freaking crazy amount of space. People do really be on drugs when going with these religious strong stances.
Yeah last time I tried Flatpak it took like 3 apps to completely fill up my laptop’s root partition and use nearly as much space as my Arch install on its own. For some reason they all used a different platform/runtime/whatever they call it. Oh this one uses the latest Gnome 3, this other one the version before, and that other one Gnome 4. Same with KDE apps, they’d also pull different versions of KDE frameworks and Qt versions. How many versions of Gnome and KDE do I need, just run it on whatever’s the latest.
Granted, my fault for not having quite a big enough root partition. But I’m skeptical about the methodology of the article because it doesn’t match real world experience at all, at least for me.
The article tries to explain how it works but I don’t think people really get it. With flatpak, since it uses runtimes, the initial few apps use an inordinate amount of space. But when you get two five and then ten apps, the space use gets lower and lower thanks to dedupping and sharing the runtimes.
So for one or two apps, it might be a lot of space per app. For five, then ten, then twenty, it won’t really matter anymore, the difference to traditional distro packaging becomes so small that normal desktop systems won’t notice it.
This is the exact same mentality that’s resulted in the overconsumption and waste that’s currently killing the planet. “Bandwidth is cheap! Diskspace is cheap! May as well be sloppy and wasteful, because resources are cheap.” Sound familiar? It has an impact on real world resource usage; the computer industry alone is driving strip-mining as we try to satisfy demands for more rare elements needed to make computers-
Bandwidth and storage are cheap… if you live in a first-world country. Increasing storage demands drive up real-world crass consumerism to upgrade, upgrade; it allows developers to be lazy and write unoptimized, crap software and distribute web applications packaged up and thinly disguised as desktop apps that consume significants percentages of CPU, memory, and disk at (apparent) idle, as they waste bandwidth polling the network - I’m looking at you, almost every Electron app.
If you think sloppy and wasteful software (flatpack as an example isn’t sloppy, but it is wasteful) isn’t responsible for real world wasteful consumerism, ask yourself why you upgraded your last computer. Was it too slow? Not enough memory? Did you buy a bigger disk because it was pretty?
People bitch about proof-of-work cryptocurrency wasting electricity, and rightly so. But they do it while installing shit 1GB Electron chat programs on their computers, and 70MB calculators on their phones. Which they then upgrade because it’s “too slow,” or because they need “the bigger GBs.” Flatpack and Snap aren’t as bad as Node, but they’re part of the “waste” trend, make no mistake.
I don’t think the article was defending bloated applications. Instead, it was defending Flatpak’s use of storage.
You are right, and I understood that, but the methodology he uses - and therefore the conclusions - is wrong. He tests two virgin installs, adds some applications, and reaches a conclusion. It’s like saying that I watched a baby be born and live until she was five, and so I’ve proven humans live forever. I also want him to confirn that no Flatpack was used for any packages on the Workstation 36 machine; I can’t speak for Fedora, but on Arch AUR there are some packages that depend on Flatpack and will install it because that’s the only way upstream releases it. So you can easily unintentionally end up with Flatpack on your Arch box if you’re not careful.
Let’s see a real-world, used desktop comparison with multiple package upgrade cycles after a year.
I didn’t use any flatpaks on the workstation install. I’m about three years with this setup on 4 computers through multiple OS updates, works great.
@sxan @beta_tester EXACTLY, I am glad SOMEBODY gets it.
I still don’t like that flatpak never knows how much it has to download
even on a 64GB (space, not RAM) machine, I would use a flatpak centric installation. The 1GB difference isn’t really that important, imo.
