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I'm fine with using traditional package managers, is there any benefit to using Flatpak? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by etherphon@lemmy.world to c/linux4noobs@lemmy.world

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I went to install some software today (Gradia) which is only available via Flathub apparently, the install size is larger than my distro which feels like a bit much for a screenshot tool. What's the deal with the massive size of Flatpaks and is it really worth all the extra space? 4GB per application?

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[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Flatpak does deduplication, if two apps include the same dependencies then that's only stored once.
What this means is that the more you lean into flatpaks, the smaller the individual app footprint on your drive becomes.

The main benefit as an end user is gaining access to software that might've never ended up in the distro repository either way. And not having to worry about missing dependencies is a nice bonus.
I recommend getting Flatseal to get a nice GUI for handling flatpak permissions.

[–] etherphon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Thank you, yeah I noticed some apps are only Flatpak which is why I asked, I understand dependencies but that seems like a lot of extra software to lean on for a screenshot tool, thought there might be more to it. I'll check out Flatseal if I need use them.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

The size seem to be crazy large for you, yeah. Here's my testinstallation for reference in Fedora 43 KDE:

[–] etherphon@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Huh, interesting, here's what the software install screen looks like in LMDE7... I have not installed any Flatpaks yet so that could be it? I'm not sure otherwise. I've run into several other large Flatpaks since, so maybe it's some bug idk.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, me having the dependencies from earlier flatpaks would be the difference.

[–] linuxPIPEpower@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 2 weeks ago

But does that include any required deps?