I have 91 flatpaks, and it is my primary way of getting apps. But the (not very shared) dependencies have been bothering me lately.
I was primarily drawn in because Gnome Software has a cool UI and because I wanted the magic of one-click installs. I heard a lot of things about Flatpak and gave it a try.
I have a relatively small 72GB BTRFS root partition with zstd:1 (lowest) enabled. I think disk compression helps with the Flatpak dependency mess, as I only have 60% disk usage currently.
Idk how much extra RAM my flatpaks use, but I don't want 4 versions of the same dependency taking up space in my RAM. Thought about enabling zram to compensate for this. As different versions of the same library in RAM are easy to compress.
I don't think this compression mentality I instinctively adopted is healthy. Make stuff reliable in expense of storage/ram -> compress storage/ram in expense of proc. power
Another thing is slow Flatpak downloads. I have a gigabit connection, and Arch mirrors generally work around 30MB/s with WiFi. Flatpak, on the other hand, hits at max. 5MB/s with its "CDN"
Overall, even though it's kind of ugly, I absolutely love the "don't think about it" mentality of flatpaks. It just works most of the time. I simply use the system package manager for programs that heavily interact with the system (like IDEs, management stuff, and so on)
I am interested in hearing your opinions.
Fedora Flatpaks are better in this regard. They are built entirely from Fedora rpms. When an rpm gets updated in the Fedora repos, rebuilding the flatpak will automatically pull in that updated rpm. And with flatpak's deduplication feature, any reused vendored dependency should be perfectly deduplicated since the input is exactly the same (the rpm).
The problem just is that the repo is small, it's affected by Fedora's risk-averseness (so no codecs), and people don't like them.