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Is Flatpaks the future for Linux?
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Considering the Steam Deck accounts for a huge portion of Linux installs, I think flatpaks are going to be here to start and only grow in popularity.
I have to ask though, why do people dislike flatpaks?
Flatpaks are slow and take more resources. It is only useful for the riches who can afford 16 GB+ RAM and TBs of storage.
Ram and storage are both dirt cheap, I'd consider any new laptop/pc with only 8gb non upgradable RAM ewaste these days. 2tb NVMe drives have dropped below 100€ already and 1tb below 50€
question, just how much bigger is say flatpack version of a program over the native package? Like right now I am running steam in back ground and I have like 8 youtube video loaded to play latter. Together my browser and steam are using 6 gb of ram. Witch I believe are snaps. How much bigger and slower are looking at?
The program itself isn't really bigger, what makes the difference is that it won't use the dependencies installed by your native package manager, it will download them, it also will download various runtimes if needed for the program, these runtimes are not really supposed to be ran if you compile the package yourself for your distribution, but if you use Flatpak, it is going to run all these runtimes for the program to work, these runtimes will use more RAM than the native build, if the runtime is not optimised, then it will also contribute to higher use of CPU and everything else in general.
It will differ from program to program, but I'll let you know that I have natively compiled EasyEffects (real-time audio manipulation) and also have tried the Flatpak build. The native version hardly uses more than 5% CPU, and is also lightweight in terms of RAM. But the Flatpak build took significantly more RAM usage and my CPU went 80% whenever I played music with the same preset that I tested on the native build. Flatpak also had to download 700-900 MB worth of internet (no idea how much space it took after installation) for the program to run.