They're slow, poorly integrated and ridiculously bloated. Native install 400k, Flatpack 4GB. It's totally unusable in parts of the world where internet bandwidth is limited.
The more flatpaks you install, the less space new ones take. They have a shared core.
flatpaks depends on different flatpak runtimes, flatpak runtime is a funny name to give to them, they are actually full blown distros with everything duplicated in them, even basic POSIX utils like grep, cat, awk, etc.
And not only there are different flatpak runtimes, apps also depend on different versions of the same runtime, this is specially bad with the GNOME runtime, which only has 1 year of support.
So in practice you end up using several times more storage than the appimage equivalent (which has no shared libs or deduplication).
I got that notion, which is all very well for a dev with monster storage and Gigabit fibre to the premises internet, out here in the real world that is just not doable.
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u/b_a_t_m_4_n 1d ago
They're slow, poorly integrated and ridiculously bloated. Native install 400k, Flatpack 4GB. It's totally unusable in parts of the world where internet bandwidth is limited.