Linux 101 stuff. Questions are encouraged, noobs are welcome!

1414 readers

1 users here now

Linux introductions, tips and tutorials. Questions are encouraged. Any distro, any platform! Explicitly noob-friendly.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

gyro@lemmy.world

Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de

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

submitted 1 week ago by etherphon@lemmy.world to c/linux4noobs@lemmy.world

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 15 points 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week ago

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

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

But does that include any required deps?