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Is linglong universal package format any good
(www.deepin.org)
I read it is better than flatpak/appimage/snap.
"Adapting Snap on deepin: Since Snap has many compatibility issues except for Ubuntu, we gave up.
- Converting some of our homegrown apps to AppImage: AppImage has good portability, and these apps can easily be used on other distributions. However, it doesn't have centralized repository storage and package management, and doesn't provide the same level of sandboxing as Snap and Flatpak, so its security can't be guaranteed, and it's not suitable to be used as the default package management method for the operating system.
- In 2017, deepin followed up the Flatpak format and completed the construction of 100+ packages, but did not continue to adapt due to the large size of the application, excessive disk
occupation, slow bug fixing and other reasons. "
Did someone consider it as better alternative for these package formats or is this just "15 standard" for package formats because deepin wanted to make something.
Are there any distros which use it apart from deepin and which is packaged in this format, because I want to drop flatpak because it takes too much space on my system.
Maybe. But they, and many others overestimate the amount of size flatpaks take up.
Flatpaks use a "runtime", a shared set of libraries and programs flatpak apps use. With one flatpak app, there is just one runtime. But with 2, 3, 10 flatpak apps, there are still only going to be 1 (to 3) runtimes on the system. This is not the same for something like appimage.
In the blog, they compare the size of deepin calculator across formats. But this is not a fair comparison. A more fair comparison would involve comparing the app size without the runtime, or comparing many apps installed.
In addition to this, if you are on btrfs, further deduplication and compression is done. This (and symlinks) won't show up in many disk and space usage analysis tools. To get a more accurate measure, use
compsizeinstead of traditional tools. It will show you how much transparent compression (when btrfs compresses files but you can stilll access them normally), symlimks and the like are saving space.Anyway, I am interested in more cross distro package managers though. Flatpak, docker, and nix cover a lot of things but have their annoying edge cases and paper cuts, especially in comparison to snap in some ways for some apps.
Edit: linglong appears to reuse system libraries, which would probably lead to significanr space savings at the cost of portability across distros
1 runtime is ≈1gb
24.08 1gb
2xQt 250 mb
2xGNOME 250 mb
25.08 1 gb
2xQt 250 mb
2xGNOME 250
It gets big fast.
If you have one app with outdated runtime it is additional 1 gb for just runtime. If you rely mostly on system packages most packages you install from flatpak will have additional weight of 1 gb runtime. So you can get app which weights 4mb with runtime which weight 250 more than app itself.
And other flatpak repos use other runtimes for example fedora.
Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing.
I hadn't tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.