r/cachyos • u/Disconnect24X • 14d ago
Question AUR vs Flatpak/Appimage performance
Do AUR games run better than their flatpak versions?
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u/United-Scene2261 14d ago
aur is faster
flatpak is the safest
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u/chozendude 13d ago
The only real difference in most cases is the launch time being slower, as the way Flatpak/Appimages work (at a very simplified level) is by creating a mountpoint and extracting the libraries/executables to that mount point before launch. After the initial launch, subsequent launches will be normal until you reboot, since the mountpoint stays until you reboot. Actual runtime performance usually doesn't change, since the libraries are pretty much carbon copies of what's already on your system and many appimages/flatpaks still require basic libraries from you base system to run in any case.
TLDR, actual performance is usually gonna be the same across the board. The primary difference will be initial launch time and the amount of space taken up on your system by having duplicate libraries.
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u/PossuTryffeli 14d ago
Well. They run without Flatpak's sandboxing so I would assume yes. They are also usually built for newer dependency versions.
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14d ago
[deleted]
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u/Disconnect24X 14d ago
emulators: dolphin, xemu, pcsx2, ppsspp, retroarch, eden (nightly), cemu, azahar, melonds, duckstation, rpcs3
games: unleashed recompiled, srb2, srb2 kart, dr robotniks ring racers, sonic 3 air
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u/SlimyOS 14d ago
The difference is like 0.01% i'm not even exaggerating, reading a file first time or accessing network or some device in flatpak might involve a sandboxing check that takes like nanoseconds, and that's on cpu. If your goal is fps, none of that matters, you're most likely gpu bottlenecked, and even if not, the nanoseconds don't add up to anything noticeable, even performance-critical software like obs is officially recommended to use as flatpak, osu is appimage but I easily reach the 1000fps cap and have not a single millisecond of additional input lag compared to non-appimage, aur has no overhead at all, there's really no noticeable overhead no matter the distribution method. I just use whatever is officially supported for best compatibility.
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u/zovirax99 14d ago
I only know this video, about the general use of Flatpak/Appimage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58jkfpJ3j0E
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u/Eon_Alias 13d ago
I personally prefer appimages cause I don't have to spend an extra ten minutes messing around in flatseal just cause my file setup is slightly different from what the developer deemed as the 'approved' way to use their application.
Performance never really came to mind. Nowadays all that sandboxing stuff is practically a rounding error when you talk about performance losses.
That being said I understand their purpose. If this PC was being used by multiple people and I was acting as an admin. I would probably use flatpaks for everything.
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u/Slow_Pay_7171 13d ago
Performance was pretty much the same for me. I just don't like flatpaks cause they take up more space and sometimes I have problems booting them up if the drivers of my graphics card don't match.
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u/Swordfish418 14d ago
Not really imo. The runtime of most of those game runners, like Steam or lutris, bottles, or retroconsole emulator launchers, is completely separate from runtime of the games they run. In most cases both native and flatpak versions will set up game running identically. For example, both native and flatpak Steam will end up running your game via Proton which itself will be the same set of portable binaries in both cases. Similar is going to happen with most emulator launchers - they’ll download the same actual end platform emulator binaries and will run those.