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.
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.
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.