Disclaimer
Flatpak uses OSTree, like Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite etc) and similar to BTRFS snapshots.
So many files are deduplicated and linked, not actually there
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
I think at one point I had like 2.5 tb of stuff stored on my 2 tb drive in my laptop, deduplication and btrfs compression is fun
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.
Thanks! The same goes for ostree system versions and BTRFS snapshots probably.
I have a similar problem with virt-manager and I think that doesnt create dynamically allocated qcow2 containers?
What does “ostree hardlinks data blobs internally” mean?
Flatpak uses OSTree - a git-like system for storing and transferring binary data (commonly referred to as ‘blobs’), and that system works by addressing such blobs by hashes of their content, using Linux hardlinks (multiple inodes all referring to the same disk blocks) to refer to the same data everywhere it’s used.
So basically, whenever Flatpak tells OSTree to download something, it will only ever store only copy of that same object (.so-file, binary, font, etc), regardless of how many times it’s used by applications across the install.
Note that this only happens internally in the OSTree repo - i.e./var/lib/flatpakor~/.local/share/flatpak, so if you have multiple separate Flatpak installations on your system then they can’t automagically de-duplicate data between each other.Thank you for the explanation.
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
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.
Immutability and sandboxing are, and always have been, a meme.
Security is a meme XD just remove your password, what do you got to hide? Lets all be a communist botnet!
Why are you replying to me?
