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.
You use arch and have flatpaks? I never liked them. They've always been a burden for me. The idea of flatpaks on Arch just never crosses my mind anymore. I actually prefer even appimages over them. At least appimages bring their own baggage with them. Once you're done with an app, you just delete it and it's gone. The only place I use flatpaks and don't even mind them is on my Bazzite Steam console. Because I only installed a couple of them (Sober and protonplus) since it's a 100% gaming console.
It also kind of takes its roots from my frustration with garbage in my home or leftover bullshit in my root
It's not viable to ditch native packages 100% (like immutable distros). But a combination of two is pretty comfortable imo
But as I said, I am not comfortable with the way flatpak does some things
I'm pretty sure you can remove flatpaks just as easily as AppImages + you have the option to delete user data specific to that app. Kinda sounds like you get all the problems OP describes without a clean way to manage it all.