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.

  • JTskulk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    175·
    2 days ago

    This is why I’ve never liked the idea of flatpak, it really seems like the Windows way of doing things. It honestly still kind of surprises me that Linux people really wanted to download random binaries from non-trusted distributors that contain a copy of every library that software needs to run. wedontdothathere.jpg

    • Overspark@feddit.nl
      111·
      2 days ago

      Many modern programming languages like Rust and Go and Zig compile statically anyway, so don’t use any libraries. The whole “my distro supplies my libraries” model has been steadily losing relevance for years now. Flatpaks are just one more example of this.

    • Leaflet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      Fedora Flatpaks are better in this regard. They are built entirely from Fedora rpms. When an rpm gets updated in the Fedora repos, rebuilding the flatpak will automatically pull in that updated rpm. And with flatpak’s deduplication feature, any reused vendored dependency should be perfectly deduplicated since the input is exactly the same (the rpm).

      The problem just is that the repo is small, it’s affected by Fedora’s risk-averseness (so no codecs), and people don’t like them.

    • yogurtwrong@lemmy.worldOP
      61·
      2 days ago

      Exactly what I’m talking about. It reminds me of the time microsoft introduced memory compression to compensate for every application bringing it’s own DLLs

      But I still think flatpak is superior to windows way of doing things because it actually has dependency management. I kinda like the idea of having multiple versions of the same library but I wish they did not come in big bundles (runtimes), but instead, came in small 1-2MB pieces.

      download random binaries from non-trusted distributors that contain a copy of every library that software needs to run

      This is overexaggeration. Flatpak, unlike places windows users get software from, is moderated, and flatpak (although chunky) has shared dependencies