That’s not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don’t actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren’t included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it’s not as bad as that.
No you weren’t. That would be ridiculous. The deb dependencies are most of your Linux install. Maybe counting just the new dependencies being installed alongside a typical deb install, but that’s still not an apples to apples comparison to 100% of all the flatpak dependencies, even ones shared with other flatpaks, and even that’s still very rarely over 1GB.
See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they’re indispensable when you don’t want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there’s the deb packages.
Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
I agree that flatpak should just invoke flatpak uninstall --unused right after uninstalling a flatpak. I don’t get why it doesn’t do this automatically. Granted, some distro package managers (used to) operate somewhat similarly in that they required the autoremove option.
I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.
That’s certainly a concern for some, but I’m using like 30 GB for all the things I’ve installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that’s on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don’t think that’s a bad trade.
And not many consider the environmental impact of this either. Sure storage might be cheap (not in my country but I digress) but more space still requires more storage and across thousands of computers and then millions of computers that’s not an insignificant increase. We should be increasing technological efficiency not what were doing at the moment which seems to be just throwing more power and resources at the problems.
On the other hand each flatpak uses >1Gb of disk where deb packages rarely require more than 100Mb
That’s not really true. It lists all the flatpak dependencies in that disk use, but a lot of those are shared, so they don’t actually use that much each if you install more than one, and the deb dependencies aren’t included at all. Flatpaks really do use more space, especially if you only have a small number of them, but it’s not as bad as that.
Nope, I was counting all dependencies, both for flatpak and apk installations.
No you weren’t. That would be ridiculous. The deb dependencies are most of your Linux install. Maybe counting just the new dependencies being installed alongside a typical deb install, but that’s still not an apples to apples comparison to 100% of all the flatpak dependencies, even ones shared with other flatpaks, and even that’s still very rarely over 1GB.
See, I only use flatpaks sparingly for this reason, but in some cases they’re indispensable when you don’t want an application to access certain parts of your system. The sandboxing is what makes them useful, in my opinion. For everything else, there’s the deb packages.
Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.
I agree that flatpak should just invoke
flatpak uninstall --unusedright after uninstalling a flatpak. I don’t get why it doesn’t do this automatically. Granted, some distro package managers (used to) operate somewhat similarly in that they required theautoremoveoption.I actually tried
flatpak uninstall --unusedand it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.That’s certainly a concern for some, but I’m using like 30 GB for all the things I’ve installed, which is a lot (12 (flatpak-system), 76 (flatpak-user)) but that’s on a 2 TB drive, which amounts to like 1½% of the total available space. I don’t think that’s a bad trade.
Lucky you. My laptop has a small HD, and all that space is a problem.
Compared to a pure install that can run on an electric toothbrush it’s a massive pill to swallow for some.
And not many consider the environmental impact of this either. Sure storage might be cheap (not in my country but I digress) but more space still requires more storage and across thousands of computers and then millions of computers that’s not an insignificant increase. We should be increasing technological efficiency not what were doing at the moment which seems to be just throwing more power and resources at the problems.