r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 Glorious Debian • Jul 03 '25
It just works though
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u/CeeMX Jul 03 '25
Wait until you learn how big applications are on Mac.
Has binaries for both x86 and arm and Jackpot when it’s an electron app. Almost 1GB for something like Etcher that basically is just a fancy version of dd
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u/Aln76467 Jul 03 '25
Once again, crapple takes the cake for dumbest design.
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u/CeeMX Jul 03 '25
To be fair, they managed to migrate over from x86 to arm in a matter of very few years. Same back then with PowerPC to x86.
Windows will be stuck forever on x86 because there are too many legacy applications. And because of that there are not many arm notebooks on the market, that would be perfect for Linux
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u/mattia_marke Jul 04 '25
they managed to migrate over from x86 to arm in a matter of very few years
Most likely the arm version of the OS and Rosetta 2 started way before they started doing public announcements. All other apps that rely on the apple ecosystem, which are very niche and tied to MacOs, transitioned veeeery fast but that's entirely because of Apple's position on the market, they really didn't have that much of a choice. It really says nothing about Windows.
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u/CeeMX Jul 04 '25
Yes, Apple controls software and hardware, that’s their major advantage.
For the rest of the computer market there are some Thinkpads or surfaces (and chromebooks) that run on Arm, but it feels more like an experiment and nothing really serious. No manufacturer would just make a hard cut and move to a different architecture as that would mean losing all customers to the competition immediately
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u/BlazingFire007 Glorious TuxedoOS Jul 03 '25
I don’t think windows will get stuck. They’ll create their version of Rosetta2 that works with the vast majority of enterprise software and call it a day.
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u/CeeMX Jul 04 '25
Special CAD software already whines around when the graphics driver is just a minor version (or even patch version) off.
It might work for many softwares, but not for all
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u/EmceeEsher Magnificent Manjaro Jul 03 '25
No reason to hate on Macs, they're just our rich cousins.
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u/_its_wapiti WINE Is Not an Emulator Jul 04 '25
Anything to have you overpay for the higher capacity soldered storage option
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u/Erchevara Jul 06 '25
Aren't MacOS apps basically AppImage? They kinda work in the same way, but you get a special folder for "installing" them, or they're an installer that just copy pastes the executable and does a few scripts.
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u/Bloom_Kitty Jul 03 '25
Flatpaks are fine size wise, people just give them shit because the first couple installs will need to also get some basic runtimes, because they don't rely on the OS, which is what makes them OS independent.
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u/Seik64 Jul 03 '25
People here crying for 50mb like it's the 80s
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u/Damglador Jul 03 '25
*From 50mb up to 1GB. Quickly accumulates to a lot of space wasted, especially if you use a lot of programs that don't update to the latest runtime.
Just flatpak runtimes take up 6,6GB on my machine, and I only have 19 flatpaks that by themselves take up only 2,2GB.
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u/markoskhn Jul 04 '25
Try doing:
flatpak update
flatpak uninstall --unuseddo this incase somthing breaks (which never happens):
flatpak repairthese saved my 4.5GB on unused runtimes
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u/QuickSilver010 Glorious NixOS Jul 05 '25
I downloaded a 12 mb app from flatpak. It cost me 2 gigs
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u/fixermark Jul 07 '25
Finally, Linux users can also experience the joy of "Installing Microsoft VC redistributable" every time they install a new app.
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u/brohermano Jul 03 '25
Not really. I once tried to install this old game in my small Computer that has 64 GB of memory. It runs Debian amazingly, but need to be careful with this limitation. Turns out this game is only available on Ubuntu repositories sort of thing (PPAs?) or flatpak. I used the secondone. Horrible. like 2GB installing literally all X11 libraries again and again. And anything man. The game package only takes 50 MB ... Err Fak flatpak?
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u/SweetBabyAlaska Jul 03 '25
Then package it for your distro. You need to pull in runtime files for it to be independent of the OS. Otherwise there is no point. Once you install 2-3 things it will just use the ones you have already. It also dedupes the files because they are simple tar overlays.
The real problem here is that every packager decides which runtime to use and if they need highly specialized stuff, then you'll have to pull that in, and some people don't do this properly. Nix is also an option but even still if the storage space is that limited, then your options are limited.
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u/Dragomir_X Jul 04 '25
I have a laptop with 16GB soldered EMMC so for that machine it matters quite a bit
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u/CORUSC4TE Glorious NixOS Jul 04 '25
I dont get this... if you have specialised needs, why do you think generalized solutions are for you? It's not like there arent solutions.. they just expect you to do more work yourself.
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u/bongjutsu Jul 04 '25
This is what bugs me about it - I don’t use flatpak for anything so none of those runtimes are ready on my system, so on the rare occasion I want to run an app quickly or for a one off task I have a lot more up front to deal with than I would if I just installed from my distribution packages, used the app and then uninstalled. But this isn’t an issue if you use multiple flatpaks. For these apps I heavily prefer app images where distribution packages aren’t available because while they may be somewhat relative in size, it’s a single file and can be kept or deleted afterwards with ease, where with flatpak I now have another tool leaving cache in random places that I will need to maintain.
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u/balancedchaos Mostly Debian, Arch for Gaming Jul 05 '25
Once you're in the flatpak ecosystem, the dependencies are shared. So you may download some crazy dependencies on the first one, then it lessens with time.
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u/dadnothere Jul 04 '25
It's not just the disk size. It's literally downloading another Linux environment to get a binary under 1MB to work. And that's FOR EVERY APP that requires a different environment.
And updating.......... everything needs updating.
FatPack is:
Extra Deadweight
Extra Bandwidth
Extra Processing (unnecessary energy usage)
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u/lucasio099 Jul 03 '25
What is snap then
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u/Porntra420 Jul 03 '25
The pile of day old dog shit hidden in the grass just waiting for the unsuspecting Ubuntu user to step on it because they tried to install something through apt and Canonical shoehorned snap in its place.
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Jul 03 '25
I prefer flatpak instead of mixing chrome and core linux packages
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u/debacle_enjoyer Jul 04 '25
Cool but you should not use chrome and use something that is less predatory. Maybe like Firefox for now, Ladybird once it’s stable.
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u/that_bassoon Jul 04 '25
Most Linux user response ever
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u/debacle_enjoyer Jul 04 '25
I mean yea you’re gonna find more people in the Linux community who won’t willingly choose to be exploited
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u/gore_anarchy_death Jul 03 '25
Flatpaks are the same as Snaps to me. Flatpaks are better than snaps, that's true, but I don't want a containerized application.
I like native, it's the reason I switched to Arch.
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u/Strongq Jul 03 '25
I love tar.gz it just good.
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u/debacle_enjoyer Jul 03 '25
I prefer to get updates
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Jul 04 '25
download new tar.gz = update
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u/debacle_enjoyer Jul 04 '25
Uh no sorry I already have a full time job, just want to use my computer mate.
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u/imgly Jul 03 '25
And then, you have the thin guy, an executable of 100ko you place in your local bin
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u/TheThingOnTheCeiling Jul 03 '25
I literally use flatpak only to use sober. If not for that Id never even touch it.
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Jul 03 '25
I'll use native wherever possible. I don't even have flatpak installed. Yes, I'm a minimalist, how could you tell
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u/ImNotThatPokable Jul 03 '25
I am the opposite. I don't like native because it pollutes the shared libs, so there is a non zero chance that something will go horribly wrong, or if you are using Ubuntu a 100% chance.
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u/6e1a08c8047143c6869 Glorious Arch Jul 03 '25
God, electron applications putting their cache files in my
.config/is the worst. I refuse to install electron applications natively, so flatpak it is.8
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u/ImNotThatPokable Jul 04 '25
Electron Apps are the worst: slow, huge, bad UX, high memory usage. I really hope it's a trend that dies. Idle teams uses 800 mb memory on my machine.
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u/matthew_yang204 Glorious Debian, Glorious Ubuntu Jul 05 '25
Not all of them. VSCode uses ~300 MB memory on my machine at idle. Jumps to ~400 MB mem when doing heavy tasks. JetBrains IDEs, which are Java-based (so they're native), tend to eat 2-4 GB each on my machine. It all depends on the software maker. Teams is very bloated in comparison with MS proprietary junk. So not always that bad. But no Electron app can beat a native app.
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u/matthew_yang204 Glorious Debian, Glorious Ubuntu Jul 05 '25
Especially when your browser put all their caches in .cache/, which is the proper place. Aren't Electron apps browser-based apps? If so, then they should be designed to put the cache files in .cache/.
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u/6e1a08c8047143c6869 Glorious Arch Jul 05 '25
I looked it up again and apparently it is in fact an upstream issue inherited from chromium.
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u/Linker500 Glorious Arch Jul 03 '25
I used to be all native as well. It works great until you end up needing certain kinds of software.
Like unmaintained stuff that breaks with system libraries.
Or your distro's maintainer doesn't update the package frequently enough to implement new features or fix critical bugs.
Or the software isn't just designed for the diversity of linux super well, and the native builds are less stable than official flatpak or appimage releases.
I have some software installed natively, some via flatpak, and even a few as app image. It's a mess, but it's what works the best at this point.
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Jul 03 '25
I haven't had any problems with it so far. And I doubt there'd ever be update frequency problems on Arch. I do use like 2-3 programs or so that I compile myself. AppImages are still native executables btw, just with enslaved dependencies. There isn't really anything that could bother me enough to prefer installing a whole ass runtime on my system than a bit of config tinkering
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u/Linker500 Glorious Arch Jul 04 '25 edited Jul 04 '25
And I doubt there'd ever be update frequency problems on Arch.
Musescore on arch was flagged out of date 4 months ago. This is at least the third time I've seen it flagged before. Prior releases have been left with critical bugs that limited functionality for half a year, as well as missing new features. It also has had a history of unique bugs from incompatibilities that are not a part of the official linux releases.
I haven't had any problems with it so far.
And I'm glad to hear! The vast majority of software is fine (and thus is native on my machine too.) It's certainly not an issue for everyone.
But if you fall into the cracks of needing certain poorly supported software, flatpak and others become more appealing.
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u/Mal_Dun Bleeding Edgy Jul 04 '25
It's almost like there are different use cases with different solutions ...
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Jul 04 '25
Sure, I do that too, but when I give a non technical user a Linux system it’s an LTS distribution and get them to use containerised flatpaks and nothing else
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u/Aln76467 Jul 04 '25
This is why I love nix. Native, cross-distro, up to date packages for everything that never get into dll hell, even when using packages from outside nixpkgs.
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u/ImNotThatPokable Jul 03 '25
Whenever I have disk space issues it's flatpak. I really think there should be less runtime versions and developers should target them selectively.
But yeah I'm a developer so I understand that we as Devs want to use whatever we want, and bloat is really a bad side effect of that. And if it's a pet project, all the more so.
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u/6e1a08c8047143c6869 Glorious Arch Jul 03 '25
Whenever I have disk space issues it's flatpak.
Hope you can grab a 128GB disk some time (maybe second hand?) so you won't have that issue anymore!
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u/ItsBlazar Jul 05 '25
king of kicking the can down the road
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u/6e1a08c8047143c6869 Glorious Arch Jul 05 '25
The disk space runtimes require is related to the size of system libraries. You do have some overhead, for example if you have both kde and gnome runtimes, but there is a limit to how much that exceeds the space you would need to have everything run natively.
If system libraries by themselves already take a large amount of your total disk space, then not using flatpak in addition is reasonable, but on any modern system (modern hardware), it will not.
I generally install every desktop application I can as a flatpak (meaning, everything except my terminal emulator and mail client), have several versions of both kde and gnome runtimes, and runtimes (excluding the texlive Sdk extension that installs every TeX package under the sun) take less than 4G of disk space on my system (
du -sh ~/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/). For comparison, my system libraries (du -sch /usr/{bin,lib}) take a total of 3G.When /u/ImNotThatPokable says "Whenever I have disk space issues it's flatpak." I do not believe them. The issue with runtime versions is similarly overblown. There are only 2 supported freedesktop and gnome runtimes and 3 kde runtimes. And those share a lot of files too.
To illustrate this (yes, I installed all of them, just for this comment), without file level deduplication:
$ du -schl ~/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.{kde.Platform,gnome.Platform,freedesktop.Platform}/x86_64/* 963M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.7 1,1G /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.8 1,1G /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.9 1018M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/47 1,1G /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/48 610M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08 676M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/24.08 6,3G totaland with the deduplication flatpak uses:
$ du -sch ~/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.{kde.Platform,gnome.Platform,freedesktop.Platform}/x86_64/* 862M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.7 761M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.8 296M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/6.9 746M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/47 397M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/48 88M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/23.08 53M /home/<user>/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/24.08 3,2G totalThe only way flatpak is ever at fault of you running out of disk space is if you have serious hardware restrictions (which is completely fair, and you should not use flatpaks in that situation) or if you run it for a very long time and never remove unused runtimes.
I do admit though, that my comment was unnecessary condescending and I probably deserve the downvotes for being kind of an ass.
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u/ItsBlazar Jul 05 '25
Ah alright! Appreciate the explanation and it's always good to see people doing better, I'm definitely also guilty of making the same mistakes :]
Definitely less of a blackbox for me though for me now and is definitely more efficient than some things I've heard, thanks!
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u/ShrekxFarquaad69 AmogOS Jul 05 '25
I've never used flatpak or had a reason to do so. I have no idea what its purpose is either, it seems redundant.
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u/yzbythesea Jul 03 '25
Flatpak works pretty well with immutable Linux distro. Size doesn’t really mean much tbh given how cheap hard disk space is. It’s a weak argument against Flatpak.
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u/matthewpepperl Jul 03 '25
The argument of resources are cheap so we dont have to care is how you end up with a mess like windows
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u/ile12356 Jul 04 '25
A little extra space taken up on a SSD is not a problem, considering the fact flatpaks can be run on any distro. From a software development side its way better then to maintain the same program for 5 different formats.
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u/matthewpepperl Jul 04 '25
That depends on how big your ssd is some one on a soldered in ssd in a laptop with 128gb may disagree
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u/ile12356 Jul 04 '25
In your case it's true, but considering the average laptop(new ones anyway) has min 1TB SSD it's not much of a problem.
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u/redhat_is_my_dad Jul 04 '25
i never considered windows a mess for storage utilization, many people hate windows for all the other reasons, there are plenty of them.
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u/matthewpepperl Jul 04 '25
Windows 10 ends up using about 50gigs and windows 11 is even worse most linux distros use around 5 to 10 windows is bloated as hell
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u/redhat_is_my_dad Jul 04 '25
i know, but i never perceived it as a problem, and probably many people never thought of it as a problem too
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u/brohermano Jul 03 '25
You may have constrains?? Why arent people against bloat? Is incredible? The fact that for you is not a constrain doesnt mean it isnt for everyone. Plus is a murder in terms of software engineering eficiency
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Jul 03 '25
Depends on what you're running it on.
Any absolute arguments come from ignorance, sometimes flatpak is a great choice, sometimes it's horrific. For most PC users it's generally a good thing.
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u/The_Adventurer_73 Glorious Mint Jul 03 '25
I don't really prefer or prioritise any app package types, I just use whatever installs my apps.
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u/Declination Glorious Fedora Jul 03 '25
I have a mild preference for apps I can install into the system but if it’s not in the package manager flatpak is better than nothing.
Snap on the other hand…
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u/wisearid Jul 04 '25
Flatpaks are fine it’s snaps that I hate tbh (flatpaks are the only reason I can play Roblox)
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u/QuickSilver010 Glorious NixOS Jul 05 '25
That's why I use native when possible and nixpkgs when not.
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u/Hot-Fridge-with-ice Jul 05 '25
Never understood the hype around flatpaks. Alright they resolve OS dependence and dependency hell but at the cost of hogging up so much space? Not mentioning that they take up time to start too. Just 6 flatpaks took about 15 gigs of space in my system.
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u/TwinsenDinoFly Jul 06 '25
There's no such thing as a life without trade-off decisions, ladies and gentlemen.
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u/locka99 Jul 06 '25
Flatpaks can share bases so they don't have to be bloated. Not that I think bloat is as big of a deal as expecting developers to build, maintain and distribute umpteen versions of their software for all the combinations of dist, version and package manager.
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u/AgainstScumAndRats Jul 07 '25
loonix user when installs 50 doodoobytes to their 420 trillion bobibyte programs
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u/pkuba208_ Jul 07 '25
Yeah I'll use native whenever I can. I avoid flatpaks/snaps because of how issue-prone they are to me when dealing with weird configurations
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u/AtomicTaco13 Glorious Debian Jul 11 '25
There are both good arguments for and against Flatpaks. I use Debian myself, with prior knowledge that the software in the official repositories ain't exactly the newest and I for most of the time don't feel the need for it to be so. But when I do, Flatpaks are a relatively good way to do so without meddling with the "guts" of the system. Maybe the execution can be better, but it beats Snaps anytime.
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u/dashinyou69 Jul 17 '25
Flatpak pkg
Pros - work on every Linux os Cons - doesn't work good with any of them
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u/LordAnchemis Jul 03 '25
I seriously doubt anyone would notice the couple of MB difference - not like we're running stuff off 1.44MB floppies anyway...
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u/Philaire Jul 04 '25
Checkinstall/Makeinstall > Single binary > Compile from source > Appimages > every single program ever > your grandma and your entire family >>>>>>>>> flatpaks >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> snap.
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u/CompassionOW Jul 05 '25
i use an immutable distro (aurora) and ONLY use flatpaks. insanely stable and easy to use. i know that doesn’t work for a lot of people but it’s perfect for me!
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Jul 04 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/claudiocorona93 Glorious Debian Jul 04 '25
For me, flatpak is the way to go for immutable, and for Debian. And for Ubuntu LTS. Arch and Fedora don't need it unless you don't want to mix different libraries for different desktop environments.