this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
216 points (97.4% liked)

Linux

48216 readers
727 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The first app installed may seem big but often the next app will use many of the same libraries rather than redownload/reinstall them.

Do you want me to repeat the flatpak test as see if I install libreoffice along side firefox that the install size wont go from 3 GiB to 3.3GiB or more?

needs to be decompressed which causes further overhead

You don't have to do this, you can run the decompressed appimage at the cost of increasing its size, which yeah you will have to decompress a lot of appimages before the space usage is comparable to that of flatpak.

Simple apps with few dependencies will be small, but big apps can bloat massively particularly

kdenlive is 200 MiB, is that too big for such application?

I wouldn’t want to run a web browser using a poorly maintained appimage for example

Good thing librewolf releases their appimage officially.

while every AppImage is crudely it’s own distro.

Do you think portable apps are also their own distro?

[–] rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Portable apps are their own distro, yes.

Why use an appimage when they also have official RPM or DEB repos? There is nothing gained here, but you have an insecure install and update mechanism.

[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Btw I just added libreoffice and kdenlive and shit is 6.2 GiB wtf.

https://imgur.com/gCUuW5P.png

How the fuck did libreoffice even increase the size by 1.4 GiB? the libreoffice appimage that is "its own distro" is 860 MiB uncompressed (it is 323 MiB when it is an appimage btw) , the flatpak added 1.4 GiB somehow kek.

There is nothing gained here

I use appimages because they have a lot of features that I really like, from having portable homes, taking less space than native packages, etc.

They also allow easy version control, did I run into a regresion from certain application? let me try the older appimage (this happened with ferdium to me btw).

Why use an appimage when they also have official RPM or DEB repos?

What if I'm using (I am btw) archlinux, and not that means that I need to rely on aur packages which I can't even compile right now because my system ran into a weird bug in cmake and haven't even been able to report because I can't register in the cmake gitlab lol.

Also I used voidlinux for a few weeks and that really opened my eyes on how much I relied upon the aur and I made the change to switch to appimages.

and update mechanism.

I use appimages with the AM packages manager that installs them, adds a symlink to PATH, adds the desktop entry, and keeps them up to date as well.

Yes I will give you that flatpaks are safer than appimages, aur or even native packages, but from there everything else is just downsides, including performance regressions, and I don't know about you, I don't like that so I don't use it, as simple as that. And it really made me mad when I saw that github thing of the other user lying that appimages bloat the system, that shit even links an article saying that firejail isn't safe as argument against appimages, when that very article even mentions that flatpaks sandbox isn't safe either kek.

[–] rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Check again with that tool that size is really strange.

I am not a fan of that bloat, as Android works similar and apps are 30MB max. I simply think flatpak is the best foundation.

[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Alright I just moved flatpak to its own partition and checked the size of the partition instead:

with firefox, kdenlive and libreoffice:

Disk (/var/lib/flatpak) 2.69 GiB / 19.12 GiB (14%) - ext4

That's much better now. But still twice the size that 15 appimages took.

This is with now having firefox librewolf brave kdenlive and libreoffice:

Disk (/var/lib/flatpak) 3.40 GiB / 19.12 GiB (18%) - ext4

Still though, the appimages take less space. A by a large margin.

[–] rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Please just use that tool. Why would you move flatpak to a different partition? But interesting results

[–] Samueru@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

WIth the same 5 application that I had before: https://imgur.com/Yn5O7Ni.png

I moved it to a different partition because I had already noticed that my Btrfs filesystem level compression was makiing the size different much smaller (the root filesystem actually grew by about 3 GiB but my file manager was reporting over 6 GIB on the flatpak dir).

EDIT: Also that tool reports the flatpak size as 3.5 GiB while fastfetch reports the flatpak partition as 3.4 GIB.

EDIT2: This is after installing yuzu:

~/ ./flatpak-dedup-checker
Directories:                /var/lib/flatpak/{runtime,app}
Size without deduplication: 5.70 GB
Size with deduplication:    4.03 GB (70% of 5.70 GB)

It actually grew considerably for yuzu, yuzu appimage itself is 60 MiB compressed 170 MiB uncompressed.