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
    1·
    27 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
      0·
      27 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.

        • Overspark@feddit.nl
          0·
          25 days ago

          Are you kidding me? Go was developed by Google, and they’re using Rust more and more as it gives them measurable security benefits. The Linux kernel is also slowly including Rust. So I have no idea what industry you’re talking about but it certainly isn’t the IT industry.