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.
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.
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.
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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.