Your words struck a chord with me, and I find myself nodding in agreement. I wholeheartedly agree with everything you’ve said. It’s refreshing to hear such a clear and well-articulated take on “this”. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I fell for the lie of flatpak not being bloated, I just nuked flatpak from my PC since I just run arch anyways. Im not sure if repo is safe to remove. You might be able to run rmlint -g and see how much data can be deduplicated on an FS level, I never checked myself since I run f2fs, but if you run an FS with dedupe capabilities it may work for you.
It’s not as dramatic for me but it’s still bad. I myself freed at least 20 Gb from my computer when I remove flat pack and all of its crap. and migrated my apps to aur myself.
A lot of that data doesn’t actually exist, ostree hardlinks data blobs internally, so the actual size on disk is much smaller than most disk usage tools will show.
Convenient libraries/frameworks are fat. Because they are fat, they need frequent updates/security fixes, breaking codebase more often. With flatpack, developers can freeze lib versions at a convenient point, without caring for system dependencies.
That’s why I think AppImage is the best. Despite needing to pack everything it needs it’s always far more lightweight than flatpak. I’d rather download a 50mb appimage than several gigabytes of an entire OS libraries and then the updates requiring roughly the same size. That and I have a shitty internet
In my experience updates aren’t that big. The flatpak cli ux is just confusing to read how much data actually has to be downloaded because of deduplication.
I have like 4 gigs of flatpak updates I keep unchecking because at my horrible internet speed it would take the entire day if not more to download. Honestly, if you’re right then this is a horrendous design flaw.
TBH I dislike Appimage purely because I can’t be bothered to go and check them all individually for new versions all the time, it feels like being on Windows again. I don’t mind a little bloat for the sake of convenience. But that’s just personal preference of course.
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