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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

> Even with an unusual amount of runtimes and apps, Flatpak somehow manages to use 37.73 GB, even with most browsers installed as a flatpak.

That's a lot. Complete operating systems with similar amount of applications installed can take a fraction of that. That's larger than / partition on my PC used to be not that long ago (until I stopped splitting /home out altogether).

My phone has a 32 GB eMMC. I have just a handful of small Flatpak apps installed on it and Flatpak already takes more disk space than the whole fresh OS did there. The thing is that it mostly scales not with number of apps, but with number of runtimes installed - and you only need a single app to still be on an outdated runtime to make it keep excessive space.

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My relatively fresh macbook pro is sitting at a little over 100GB with just a few apps installed (I'm not even using it fulltime yet because not everything is installed). That includes 25GB in the Library directory in my homedir.

On my primary work macbook (which ONLY contains work apps and software dev, nothing else), I'm hitting against the 1TB SSD and have to delete caches to get space back from time to time. The Library directory is currently a whopping 220GB (just checked with du) and I have no idea why.

Windows was a similar experience before I replaced it with a Debian + Steam install.

37GB for an extreme case of 173 large GUI apps built to 97 different runtimes on a system where I can get the latest and greatest version (or older version) of the app without being hobbled by dependency hell seems like a steal by comparison.

For what it’s worth, Macs can reboot to previous versions and has many features linux desktops don’t out of the box.

Though I would be interested in a deduplicated nix store of the same number of apps — which is still the best solution imo.

Not sure what you mean by "reboot to previous versions". My macbook can only boot Ventura after upgrading. If I wanted to boot Monterey, I'd have to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch (or restore from backup). Also, every system has features that other systems don't have out of the box.

The extreme 37gb example is already deduplicated and compressed (from over 100gb of data). Plus it doesn't require learning the user-unfriendly nix (which is absolutely necessary for debugging when things break).

I don’t know how you work but in our company (~ 100 people) everybody has a Mac and literally no one has a 1TB drive and no one has issues with hard drive space either (including devs).

Furthermore the Library folder contains application’s data, not applications…

Yup, I was expecting this kind of nit-picking. Bottom line is that 37gb for such an extreme number of apps and runtimes is actually pretty small, and thus Flatpak is doing a decent job (especially compared to everyone else but the fringe systems that regular users don't want).

You can't get to the bottom line of app size from the top line of app data and cache size, clear that fog away to see that the job isn't decent

That's unacceptable, it's Windows levels of bloat.

Of course, Windows does something similar to maintain backwards compatibility with apps going all the way back to Windows 3.1, and does so pretty efficiently all things considered. Flatpack seems anything but efficient.

To be fair, the author of the article states that 173 graphical applications take up that much space, not just a handful of browsers. I think gp misses the point the author is trying to make, that over 100 apps takes up less space than expected.

That's not a huge number of applications at all, unless we're talking about asset-heavy things like games. It would usually take about 10 GB or so complete with the whole operating system.

> It would usually take about 10 GB or so complete with the whole operating system.

So it takes around 3.7x the size it should? That's not unusual given that it isolates all dependencies.

It's not unusual, but it's still bad

It's a lot, but I think we've lost that battle and society has collectively decided it's okay to sacrifice untold amounts of storage space in service of things like more stable installations, extra features, etc. It's aesthetically displeasing to install a 10 GB text editor or whatever but I don't think it's generally ideal in application development to optimize for very limited storage on phones either, especially with phone storage presumably just growing bigger over time too.

But this is not the general battlefield, but a Linux niche one, where the sub-society hasn't collectively made a decision yet

That's fair. I figure a lot of the same design pressures apply though, and of course there's a cost to diverging from what the rest of the world is doing.

I have plenty of stuff installed via Flatpak, size is not as nearly as much.

    flatpak list --columns=ref,size

I have 64 apps installed which takes 11GB. And I have Steam with proton and app that uses texlive which combined are more than a GB in size and to my knowledge same on distros. Since OP is a dev for front end for wine which is shipped as flatpak, likely a lot big apps.

It really isn't a lot. Why would you bring up a phone when I don't know of any phones that use flatpaks (or snaps) except very edge case ubuntu experimental phone distros?

Because I use it on my phone?

These days it's often being used on phone distros that have nothing to do with Ubuntu (PureOS, Mobian, postmarketOS, Fedora, Arch...). I have like six or seven apps installed via Flatpak, and about a hundred via regular repos. I'm glad Flatpak exists as it enables some use cases that wouldn't be possible otherwise, but let's not pretend that its disk usage is not a PITA (the way it handles updates is super annoying too, you never know how much free space you actually need to have available for it to succeed).

>My phone has a 32 GB eMMC

And each app has its own copy of any dependency it uses and apps are isolated from each other.

No, most apps come from apt repository and therefore use shared dependencies. I wouldn't mention using Flatpak on my phone if I used Android there.

Games these days are easily 100GB alone. So 37GB is still well within current hardware capabilities.

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