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Comment by sgc | Hacker News Reader

I recently installed Debian 13 and went with the default partition sizes for /, /var, swap etc. I had two flatpaks installed and my entire /var partition was filled up with 10gb of flatpak data. Frankly very bad default partition sizes and I should not have been so trusting, but flatpak is an unbearably hot mess.

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Flatpak installs and shares runtimes. That's what makes it so stable, regardless of your distro.

So yes, if you install 1 KDE app from Flatpak, you will have the KDE runtime. But that is true if you install 1 KDE app while on Busybox as well. It's the subsequent KDE apps that will reuse the dependencies.

If those apps are built against the same runtime version

Which is often not the case. For those of us with slow internet connections, flatpack take hours to download programs that would otherwise take seconds.

And for those of who administer lots of systems, it means I have to track all of the bugs in multiple runtimes.

How many versions of openssl are on my Silverblue laptop? I honestly couldn't tell you.

That's the entire draw of Flatpak - I can have applications with out of sync libraries and they just work. That's a big big headache with system provided packages.

I don't think Debian creates a separate /var by default, only /, /boot, swap, and uefi.

It defaults to one / for it all, but if you tell it not to it will suggest partition sizes for you. Regardless this is definitely self-inflicted.

Absolutely. I should have verified partition sizing, and I should never have allowed even one flatpak. That doesn't make Debian default sizes and installation process anywhere close to good.

Why, of all root directories, would you skimp out on /var? It literally stands for variable data.

Ask the Debian maintainers. That was their recommendation, and I trusted them - presuming they would recommend something that would work more than two weeks on a rather standard laptop installation. I will have to re-partition within the next year, because their / partition is too small as well.

But the default is to just use / no? So you did not trust them.

I think this happens because the default option is “recommended for new users”. So some not-new users believe that the other options are better for them.

That default options reads like this: “All files in one partition (recommended for new users)”

No, they make more than one recommendation - including which partitions to make and the sizes for each of them should you opt into their separate partition path in the installer. So they have defaults for multiple partitions and partition sizes - and I trusted them to have thought them through.

Two improvements that could be made: 1) Easy: put a brief Note in the installer indicating what might fill up the partitions quickly so people can have a heads-up, do a little research, and make a better decision. 2) moderate: still keep the Note, but also check the disk size and maybe ask which type of workload (server, development, home user), then propose something a bit more tailored.

Why not just use the default, instead of separate partitions for everything? This is not a 30-year-old BSD.

For better control over permissions:

```

/ / ext4 defaults 1 1

/home /home ext4 defaults,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

/tmp /tmp ext4 defaults,bind,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

/var /var ext4 defaults,bind,nosuid 1 2

/boot /boot ext4 defaults,nosuid,noexec,nodev 1 2

```

Because it isn't used for much? It's mostly just logs these days. Most data on most systems goes in /usr or /home. I would say the weird thing here is that Flatpak puts runtimes in /var by default instead of ~/.cache or something like that.

Where do you think docker containers are installed?

User-mode Flatpaks keep things in ~/.local/share/flatpak. This person simply installed a Flatpak in system-mode, which puts it somewhere other users could also run it (i.e. not your home directory).

Libvirt virtual machines are also stored there.

>I should never have allowed even one flatpak

I don't think that's the best conclusion: these days, disk is cheaper than it has ever been, and that "foundational" 8 GB will serve all the Flatpaks you want. Installing apps from packages sprays the same dependency shit all over your system; Flatpak was nice enough to contain it, so you immediately noticed it.

Flatpak is a good idea.

It's at best a mixed bag which makes it harder to fine-tune apps on your system and with limited security benefits (which again become harder to improve yourself).

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html#flatpak

don't know why people are obsessing with the partition scheme interest of two apps using as much of a windows10 installation.

my full / for a desktop debian with ton of stuff is under 4gb.

That was what was insane to me. I expected a couple hundred mb each for my first couple of apps. Not a pleasure in itself, but I was blindsided by the 10gb. The apps were clearly also part of the problem - they should not have so many dependencies. However even after I removed them, flatpak was using 8gb+, I had to purge it to reclaim space. That is why I called it a hot mess.

Mind sharing which two apps you went with?

When installing just two apps, even if both are in the same (KDE or GNOME) realm, you can very easily end up with 8 flatpaks (including runtimes) or more. This is due to a variety runtimes and their versions: One for KDE or GNOME Platform release (about two a year) plus a yearly freedesktop base) and not all apps being updated to the latest runtimes constantly.

You then have to add at least 6 locale flatpaks to these hypothetical 8 flatpaks.

Especially with Debian, locales matter, of you don't do a `sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales` and pick what you need before installing flatpaks on a default install, you will get everything and thus gigabytes of translations you don't even understand, wasting your disk space.

I recommend always using LVM so you can grow/shrink filesystems easily.

Did you install the flatpaks for a user or system-wide?

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