For context: I habe a PC with an 8gb SSD and I somehow need to get an app on there that only has a flatpak release
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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Who likes having their hard drive space wasted?
I like flatpaks when they come from the developer. They are often more stable, up-to-date and complete than those from OS repositories.
What I don't like about them is when I have to fight the permissions. They're often too tight and make integration with the rest of the OS too hard.
Here's a rarely known secret of the Linux world. Almost no software in a Linux system came from the developer.
Every single distro, package manager or repository is handled by people who did not develop the software being packaged. The few exceptions are the software who distributes their own .deb/.rpm, appimage, flatpak or their own repository. But the bulk of tools, utilities and apps were handled by the people managing the distribution or the distro main repository. No sane developer has the team or the time to config, compile, package, and test their software to every single Linux distro that exists. Hence why Dev distributed versions are usually targeted to single channels and to specific distros and versions. Packages compatibility is a literal hell.
that's why you just compile your .flatpak file and say "gl suckas, works 4 me :^)"
Shoulda just used nix B)
Nix is very interesting, but a completely new rope to shoot yourself in the foot. A new hell is still new though.
No one does, but people like it when you install an application and it just works. It makes it easier to install applications regardless of which distro youβre on as well.
Technically it's empty space that's being wasted, if you fill it up it's being useful!
The benefits easily outweighs the cost of some extra space use. We're not talking about a lot here, after all, with dedupping, shared runtimes and what have you.
People who like having fine-grained security controls over their apps?
And the only possible way to have that is to burn through disk space?
As far as I know, yes. You tell me the alternative if youβve got it.
If all you've got against Flatpak is it uses more storage, then I don't know what to tell you. I have a 1TB drive that cost $80 and my GNOME system with 106 flatpaks uses just under 7%. The original post claiming 2TB is absurd.
There is no reason that you couldn't, for instance, bind-mount the host's nvidia drivers into the container namespace when launching the flatpak. Would avoid having to download the driver again, and reduce runtime memory pressure since the driver code pages would be shared between everything again.
I don't have the time to make a "stop doing math" meme for Unix permissions
So don't change the defaults?
Idk, probably all the people who downvoted OP and the majority of people here on Lemmy I met in discussions about Flatpak & Co. And If I look at the average size of a modern Windows installation, I'd say at least 70% of desktop users to begin with.