You keep banging on about "Freedom" You are free to install what the hell you like, my point is you have to be bonkers to install say a Text Editor Flatpak that is as big as your entire freshly installed OS. And what the hell is in these gigantic packages? You have less than 2MB needed for Video Downloader but the Flatpak bundle is 3.6GB, what is going on here? Are you not just a little suspicious of these software systems? Windows Portable packages are roughly the same size as the installed variety, so again why are Flatpak's so ginormous?
As far as I know flatpaks are containers/VMs. The application within runs effectively in a sandbox, with its own set of dependencies and libraries. Note that these additional files are shared/deduplicated, so, more flatpaks use space more efficiently.
I appreciate your point but when a single installation of what should be a very tiny program takes up 3.6GB, the same size as the latest Zorin ISO [3.8GB], you cannot in all seriousness use the word "efficiently" in the conversation The HDD in my first PC was 4GB FFS.
Thank you for giving the rest of us the freedom to choose on criteria other than your biased opinion. Your opinion that anyone not agreeing with your "points" is "crazy" seems biased to me. Maybe you should educate yourself as to what these contain & their purpose before passing judgement in a public forum. No. I don't have problems with flatpaks. So far they work fine for me. Space is not a problem on my 1 terabyte SSD. Zorin Core works fine for my computing needs as well. Linux, for me, is about choice. So many distros, so much effort put into programming every possibility, every effort made for free source & to provide avenues to run that which is not free sourced. Choice to run free sourced & commercial in a co-existing dual boot environment, side by side. Freedom of choice. Snap, Flatpak, Steam, Wine are all about having choice & other possibilities. In this world almost no single "thing" works for everyone. I don't understand why "freedom of choice" triggers so much animosity & hatred. Different should not be threatening.
Ah, the wonderful world of containerized apps. Afaik flatpaks are encapsulated with all dependencies, and run in an isolated environment, but not really virtualized. Strictly a Linux thing; portable between different distro’s. I’d look for non-container version of the same app. Even compile it from source code if necessary.
"I don't understand why "freedom of choice" triggers so much animosity & hatred" What are you talking about? Criticism of these containerized apps is now hate speech? Don't be such a prick.
If you run only one flatpak, yes, that's huge. But when running multiple, as it's often the case, deduplication causes the space to be only used once. More efficiently, not efficiently in general. Btw. I don't like flatpaks. For my little bit of Linux adventure, the normal package manager works fine, no flatpak or other shenanigans.
Its difficult to assess how much space Flatpaks take up, I have four installed, the Flatpak folder remains at 40GB but are all the Flatpak files in that one folder? Probably not, many will be dispersed around the operating system. My laptop and many on sale these days are more like tablets with a keyboard and come with pretty tiny hard drives, mine has 128GB. 40GB for the operating system and another 40GB for a Flatpak folder and there wouldn't be a lot left. Clearly I wont be using Flatpak on my laptop. Its not as if the Flatpak software works any better either, duff software is generally duff in all its forms.
hm. true; flatpaks are a pita.. i used it only twice. unsurptisingly both for browsers.[ falkon and librewolf.] lazy walrus..i cannot be bothered to compile the stuff myself. i like falkon, a pity that it cannot- or could not yet- be found in apt... and i only need librewolf for the ff extensions..i hardly use it. luckily i got a good ole hdd in my desktop. and a sligtly larger ssd in my lappy. too-tiny ssd`s are totally overhyped imho..]
Falkon is available in the LMDE7 Software Manager as a system package, I would assume from that that its available across Debian 12/13.
Tested it on Zorin 17.3 First "apt-cache search falkon" and it showed up. Then "sudo apt install falkon" - close to 400 MB to install it with all of the necessary support packages.
Flatpaks use shared dependencies, think on these like the DLLs or VisualC++ or .NET equivalents of Linux. For example: GNOME and KDE frameworks (multiple versions, like .net 3.5, 4, 5, and so on on Windows), media codecs, graphic drivers. These are installed the first time you install a Flatpak (this is why they are 1GB) But subsequent Flatpaks simply use the shared dependencies