Post #2782605

2026-05-22 06:45 UTC

Maybe. But they, and many others overestimate the amount of size flatpaks take up. Flatpaks use a “runtime”, a shared set of libraries and programs flatpak apps use. With one flatpak app, there is just one runtime. But with 2, 3, 10 flatpak apps, there are still only going to be 1 (to 3) runtimes on the system. In the blog, they compare the size of deepin calculator. But this is not a fair comparison. A more fair comparisom would involve comparing the app size without the runtime. In addition to this, if you are on btrfs, further deduplication and compression is done. This (and symlinks) won’t show up in many disk and space usage analysis tools. To get a more accurate measure, use compsize instead of traditional tools. It will show you how much transparent compression (when btrfs compresses files but you can stilll access them normally), symlimks and the like are saving space. Anyway, I am interested in more cross distro package managers though. Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps.

Replies (2)

@mecen@lemmy.ca 2026-05-22 08:38

1 runtime is ≈1gb 24.08 1gb 2xQt 250 mb 2xGNOME 250 mb 25.08 1 gb 2xQt 250 mb 2xGNOME 250 It gets big fast. If you have one app with outdated runtime it is additional 1 gb for just runtime. If you rely mostly on system packages most packages you install from flatpak will have additional weight of 1 gb runtime. Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing. I hadn’t tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.

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@KianaTabion@lemmy.today 2026-05-22 11:48

Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps. I’m still pretty new to nix - I’ve only recently started experimenting within a NixOS-loaded VM. So, please pardon me for my ignorance. But would you be so kind to point me towards its “annoying edge cases and paper cuts especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps”? Thank you in advance :) !

Open ##2785326