this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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This is the exact same mentality that's resulted in the overconsumption and waste that's currently killing the planet. "Bandwidth is cheap! Diskspace is cheap! May as well be sloppy and wasteful, because resources are cheap." Sound familiar? It has an impact on real world resource usage; the computer industry alone is driving strip-mining as we try to satisfy demands for more rare elements needed to make computers-
Bandwidth and storage are cheap... if you live in a first-world country. Increasing storage demands drive up real-world crass consumerism to upgrade, upgrade; it allows developers to be lazy and write unoptimized, crap software and distribute web applications packaged up and thinly disguised as desktop apps that consume significants percentages of CPU, memory, and disk at (apparent) idle, as they waste bandwidth polling the network - I'm looking at you, almost every Electron app.
If you think sloppy and wasteful software (flatpack as an example isn't sloppy, but it is wasteful) isn't responsible for real world wasteful consumerism, ask yourself why you upgraded your last computer. Was it too slow? Not enough memory? Did you buy a bigger disk because it was pretty?
People bitch about proof-of-work cryptocurrency wasting electricity, and rightly so. But they do it while installing shit 1GB Electron chat programs on their computers, and 70MB calculators on their phones. Which they then upgrade because it's "too slow," or because they need "the bigger GBs." Flatpack and Snap aren't as bad as Node, but they're part of the "waste" trend, make no mistake.
I don't think the article was defending bloated applications. Instead, it was defending Flatpak's use of storage.
You are right, and I understood that, but the methodology he uses - and therefore the conclusions - is wrong. He tests two virgin installs, adds some applications, and reaches a conclusion. It's like saying that I watched a baby be born and live until she was five, and so I've proven humans live forever. I also want him to confirn that no Flatpack was used for any packages on the Workstation 36 machine; I can't speak for Fedora, but on Arch AUR there are some packages that depend on Flatpack and will install it because that's the only way upstream releases it. So you can easily unintentionally end up with Flatpack on your Arch box if you're not careful.
Let's see a real-world, used desktop comparison with multiple package upgrade cycles after a year.
I didn't use any flatpaks on the workstation install. I'm about three years with this setup on 4 computers through multiple OS updates, works great.
I'm sure it works fine; the question is about how disk space usage compares.