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Is linglong universal package format any good (www.deepin.org)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by mecen@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[-] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 1 points 16 hours ago

Were these numbers generated using compsize or a similar tool that asseses deduplication, symlinks, and compression properly?

I get much different numbers than I use one or the other.

gdu:

gdu ~ Use arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help

***
/var/lib/flatpak
***
    2.6 GiB ████████  ▏/runtime
  471.7 MiB █▍        ▏/app
  114.4 MiB ▎         ▏/repo
    9.1 MiB           ▏/appstream
  164.0 KiB           ▏/exports
        0 B           ▏.changed

compsize:

[moonpie@nefertem flatpak]$ sudo compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak
Processed 73225 files, 31115 regular extents (70649 refs), 35977 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL       64%      1.9G         2.9G         6.4G
none       100%      1.3G         1.3G         2.6G
zstd        35%      596M         1.6G         3.8G

Only 2 gb's are actually being used, even though some tools might be reporting 6.4 gb.

And this is with these runtimes installed:

Name                                               Application ID                                     Version                               Branch                  Installation
Freedesktop Platform                               org.freedesktop.Platform                           freedesktop-sdk-23.08.34              23.08                   system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                25.0.7                                23.08-extra             system
Mesa                                               org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08                   system
Mesa (Extra)                                       org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default                26.0.5                                25.08-extra             system
Codecs Extra Extension                             org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra                                                    25.08-extra             system
GNOME Application Platform version 49              org.gnome.Platform                                                                       49                      system
Breeze GTK theme                                   org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze                           6.6.5                                 3.22                    system

So you can get app which weights 4mb with runtime which weight 250 more than app itself.

Except for the fact that the runtime is reused across apps, meaning that another app which uses up that runtime won't be taking up any extra space.

Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing.

You can sandbox them with something like firejail or bubblewrap.

I hadn’t tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.

Similar, you can sandbox with bubblewrap. But you gotta write nix code to do it because ofc:

https://github.com/fgaz/nix-bubblewrap , https://github.com/nixpak/nixpak , https://sr.ht/~alexdavid/jail.nix/

I've tried to use them before though, definitely not as easy as flatpak's flatseal sandboxing in comparison. Also, nix apps on non nix distros aren't GPU accelerated.

this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
13 points (100.0% liked)

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