Many modern programming languages like Rust and Go and Zig compile statically anyway, so don't use any libraries. The whole "my distro supplies my libraries" model has been steadily losing relevance for years now. Flatpaks are just one more example of this.

Exactly what I'm talking about. It reminds me of the time microsoft introduced memory compression to compensate for every application bringing it's own DLLs

But I still think flatpak is superior to windows way of doing things because it actually has dependency management. I kinda like the idea of having multiple versions of the same library but I wish they did not come in big bundles (runtimes), but instead, came in small 1-2MB pieces.

download random binaries from non-trusted distributors that contain a copy of every library that software needs to run

This is overexaggeration. Flatpak, unlike places windows users get software from, is moderated, and flatpak (although chunky) has shared dependencies

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.

I kinda get it for immutable distros, where you can't just install dependencies. But other than that the appeal is also very lost on me.

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.

Neigsendoig (my producer) and I started to shy away from Flatpaks. We've hated Snap already, and rather distro packages, third-party compiled packages and AppImages.

Small SSD + compression is faster than HDD with no compression ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Plus I've been planning to upgrade my (8gb) RAM and SSD, for like, the last 5 years? Never gonna upgrade lol

No idea how flatpak or snap works here (I want my rpm:s dammit) but I bet someone started adding compression to something at some point.

You can’t deduplicate already compressed data, except in theory. If you want deduplication, do that first, then compress the data. (i.e. use ZFS. Friends don’t let friends use subpar filesystems.)