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.
The appeal of Flatpak is not that I prefer it to my distro package manager.
The appeal is for the application author who finds the fragmentation in Linux a problem. It is a way for them to target “Linux” and not individual distros. It is a way for app authors to control the distribution and the support surface in a way that turning over control to package managers does not allow.
Which means the appeal for me is just that I can get apps as Flatpak that I cannot find in my distro repo.
On Arch, I hardly ever use Flatpak. On other distros, I use them more. I do use the pgAdmin Flatpak everywhere though because all the distro versions I have tried are garbage.