this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
967 points (98.6% liked)
linuxmemes
21453 readers
1858 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
- These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But it appears like we're in a situation where it's not used for specific situations, but for lots of different things. Just a few Flatpak programs starts to chew through a significant amount of disk space, and some programs are only being distributed as Flatpaks.
flatpak distribution is generally done by the developer as a common packaging method. if a distribution wants a native install it's up to package maintainers of the distribution to support the application. although the package maintainers have to make sure they're packaging the right versions of dependencies which becomes a problem known as dependency hell.
in your example of handbrake it's true the main application is pretty small but that's because it relies on libraries and is a wrapper for ffmpeg. even if you install through a package manager you still need to compare the total size of dependencies.
the disc space usage becomes a problem due to installing libraries both natively and in sandbox. however if you keep a relatively small system install and install applications through flatpak the disc usage will be pretty negligible. if disc space is really a concern then using something like btrfs with compression+dedup would probably solve most problems.
It just seems like it's a lot of papering over a fairly substantial problem. While the example I gave was Handbrake, which does seem like it should be a unique example, every other piece of software that I check Flatpak versions of also had ludicrously wasteful storage issues.
I'm aware of dependency hell, but it seems to me that most software doesn't have that as a problem, not if the libraries are sensibly maintained? After all, the fact that upgrading a library can improve all the software that uses it seems like it's usually a positive thing. And the ballooning storage requirements of Flatpak make it a tool that should be used occasionally, rather as a primary way to release software. Using a filesystem that can detect duplicates would help, but itself also seems like a special-case kind of solution, and not a great solution to turn to just to avoid what seems to me to be a significant issue.