I have 91 flatpaks, and it is my primary way of getting apps. But the (not very shared) dependencies have been bothering me lately.

I was primarily drawn in because Gnome Software has a cool UI and because I wanted the magic of one-click installs. I heard a lot of things about Flatpak and gave it a try.

I have a relatively small 72GB BTRFS root partition with zstd:1 (lowest) enabled. I think disk compression helps with the Flatpak dependency mess, as I only have 60% disk usage currently.

Idk how much extra RAM my flatpaks use, but I don’t want 4 versions of the same dependency taking up space in my RAM. Thought about enabling zram to compensate for this. As different versions of the same library in RAM are easy to compress.

I don’t think this compression mentality I instinctively adopted is healthy. Make stuff reliable in expense of storage/ram -> compress storage/ram in expense of proc. power

Another thing is slow Flatpak downloads. I have a gigabit connection, and Arch mirrors generally work around 30MB/s with WiFi. Flatpak, on the other hand, hits at max. 5MB/s with its “CDN”

Overall, even though it’s kind of ugly, I absolutely love the “don’t think about it” mentality of flatpaks. It just works most of the time. I simply use the system package manager for programs that heavily interact with the system (like IDEs, management stuff, and so on)

I am interested in hearing your opinions.

  • Mugita Sokio@discuss.onlineEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    Neigsendoig (my producer) and I started to shy away from Flatpaks. We’ve hated Snap already, and rather distro packages, third-party compiled packages and AppImages.

    • Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.frEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Doesn’t have AppImages the same problem than Flatpak regarding dependencies duplicated for each program ? If so, what is their advantage over Flatpak ?

      • SteveTech@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        It’s worse with AppImages since they bundle everything in the same file. At least flatpaks do a little bit of deduplication with their platform packages.

      • Mugita Sokio@discuss.onlineEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        All the dependencies are stored in the AppImage itself. You can even make an AppImage.home folder so you can make it portable. That’s from my research on the matter, though I use them myself.