this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
16 points (75.0% liked)
Open Source
31713 readers
161 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
- !libre_culture@lemmy.ml
- !libre_software@lemmy.ml
- !libre_hardware@lemmy.ml
- !linux@lemmy.ml
- !technology@lemmy.ml
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hate them (seriously).
It's basically a second distro inside your distro (try
du -chs /var/lib/flatpak/
) and if something breaks (eg. last year mesa with my graphics card) it isn't easy to identify were the problem is (because all libs update at the same time), plus you can't just try a newer (or older) version of some lib as you would in your distro.Moreover, you can't flatpak CLI tools (also servers and OS components, but I guess the ubuntu folks are the only ones who care about those).
So, I'm not gonna pretend flatpak doesn't use more space then normal apps, but due to deduplication (and sometimes filesystem compression), flatpaks often use less space than people think.
I only have one flatpak app installed, and
du
says that takes up 1.7 GB of space... but actually, when using a tool that takes up BTRFS transparent compression into account, only half of that space is used on my disk.I recommend using compsize for a BTRFS compression aware version of
du
andflatpak-dedup-checker
for a flatpak filesystem deduplication aware checker of space used.I think flatpak absolutely does use up more space, because yes, it is another linux distro in your distro. But I think that's a tradeoff people accept in order to have a universal package manager for graphical apps.
Also, you can flatpak cli tools. They are just difficult to run at first because you have to do the
flatpak run org.orgname.appname
thing, but you can alias that to a short command. Here is a flatpak of micro, a terminal based text editor.(I prefer nix for cli tools though, and docker/podman/containers for services).
This is why the marketing around flatpak bothers me. It's touted as some kind of "universal Linux package manager" but Linux is just a kernel - all the stuff that apps depend on comes with the distro. So, in order for flatpaks to be "distro independent" they basically have to supply all the stuff that normally comes from the distro - effectively building a second distro on top of your existing one.
Nix and Guix are the same but at least I think they're more up front that they are effectively distros that can run on top of your existing distro or as a standalone operating system directly on top of Linux.