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.

  • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    2 days ago

    No idea how flatpak or snap works here (I want my rpm:s dammit) but I bet someone started adding compression to something at some point.

    You can’t deduplicate already compressed data, except in theory. If you want deduplication, do that first, then compress the data. (i.e. use ZFS. Friends don’t let friends use subpar filesystems.)

    • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’ve got 4.6GB of flatpaks installed on their own subvolume and compression only reduces that to 4.1GB. I would guess that it’s mostly compressed already. The same compression settings reduced my root subvolume from 23GB to 8.4GB.

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
      1·
      2 days ago

      I’d imagine that BTRFS dedup works the same. Any other way would be stupid. Of course if the stuff is compressed by flatpak already there’s nothing either FS can do.

      • enumerator4829@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Everytime someone says something positive about BTRFS I’m compelled to verify whether RAID6 is usable.

        The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for “anything but testing with throw-away data.”

        Alas, no. The Arch wiki still contains the same quote, and friends don’t let friends store data without parity.

        So in the end, the best BTRFS can do right now is running RAID10 for a storage efficiency of 50%. Running dedup on that feels a bit wasteful…

        (Sidenote: actually, ZFS runs dedup after per block compression, so it can only dedup blocks that are identical. Still works though, unlike when people do user level .tar.gz-style compression. The it’s game over.)