Flatpaks and Snaps become more efficient in terms of storage usage the more you use them...
I'm not disagreeing with that, but how many apps an average user requires that he can't find in the distro's repository? And how many snaps he should have installed, so it'd be more space-efficient than appimages, 10? 20? 30?
hint: for me - one is too many.
Flatpak and Snap share dependencies while Appimage doublicates all of them...
On the other hand, appimage only includes the libraries actually required by an app. Where Snap/Flatpack install big fat runtimes.
I've recently made a very simple gtk4 app and packaged it with all dependencies into a 10mb appimage you can just download and run. The very same app would rely on 250+ mb gtk4 runtime with snap.
And I could be fine with that; but no, it's not that simple, you'll have x3 gtk4 runtimes on your system. Because snap keeps 3 last versions of every snap pkg and it's dependencies. I don't know what flatpack installs, but it's not efficient in that regard either.
2-3 gigs of libraries a program might not even need. It's just wasted space for an average linux user. And if I was fine with that, I would be using Windows right now.
I'm not disagreeing with that, but how many apps an average user requires that he can't find in the distro's repository? And how many snaps he should have installed, so it'd be more space-efficient than appimages, 10? 20? 30?
hint: for me - one is too many.
On the other hand, appimage only includes the libraries actually required by an app. Where Snap/Flatpack install big fat runtimes.
I've recently made a very simple gtk4 app and packaged it with all dependencies into a 10mb appimage you can just download and run. The very same app would rely on 250+ mb gtk4 runtime with snap.
And I could be fine with that; but no, it's not that simple, you'll have x3 gtk4 runtimes on your system. Because snap keeps 3 last versions of every snap pkg and it's dependencies. I don't know what flatpack installs, but it's not efficient in that regard either.
2-3 gigs of libraries a program might not even need. It's just wasted space for an average linux user. And if I was fine with that, I would be using Windows right now.