this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Portable apps are their own distro, yes.
Why use an appimage when they also have official RPM or DEB repos? There is nothing gained here, but you have an insecure install and update mechanism.
Btw I just added libreoffice and kdenlive and shit is 6.2 GiB wtf.
https://imgur.com/gCUuW5P.png
How the fuck did libreoffice even increase the size by 1.4 GiB? the libreoffice appimage that is "its own distro" is 860 MiB uncompressed (it is 323 MiB when it is an appimage btw) , the flatpak added 1.4 GiB somehow kek.
I use appimages because they have a lot of features that I really like, from having portable homes, taking less space than native packages, etc.
They also allow easy version control, did I run into a regresion from certain application? let me try the older appimage (this happened with ferdium to me btw).
What if I'm using (I am btw) archlinux, and not that means that I need to rely on aur packages which I can't even compile right now because my system ran into a weird bug in cmake and haven't even been able to report because I can't register in the cmake gitlab lol.
Also I used voidlinux for a few weeks and that really opened my eyes on how much I relied upon the aur and I made the change to switch to appimages.
I use appimages with the AM packages manager that installs them, adds a symlink to PATH, adds the desktop entry, and keeps them up to date as well.
Yes I will give you that flatpaks are safer than appimages, aur or even native packages, but from there everything else is just downsides, including performance regressions, and I don't know about you, I don't like that so I don't use it, as simple as that. And it really made me mad when I saw that github thing of the other user lying that appimages bloat the system, that shit even links an article saying that firejail isn't safe as argument against appimages, when that very article even mentions that flatpaks sandbox isn't safe either kek.
Check again with that tool that size is really strange.
I am not a fan of that bloat, as Android works similar and apps are 30MB max. I simply think flatpak is the best foundation.
Alright I just moved flatpak to its own partition and checked the size of the partition instead:
with firefox, kdenlive and libreoffice:
Disk (/var/lib/flatpak) 2.69 GiB / 19.12 GiB (14%) - ext4
That's much better now. But still twice the size that 15 appimages took.
This is with now having
firefox
librewolf
brave
kdenlive
andlibreoffice
:Disk (/var/lib/flatpak) 3.40 GiB / 19.12 GiB (18%) - ext4
Still though, the appimages take less space. A by a large margin.
Please just use that tool. Why would you move flatpak to a different partition? But interesting results
WIth the same 5 application that I had before: https://imgur.com/Yn5O7Ni.png
I moved it to a different partition because I had already noticed that my Btrfs filesystem level compression was makiing the size different much smaller (the root filesystem actually grew by about 3 GiB but my file manager was reporting over 6 GIB on the flatpak dir).
EDIT: Also that tool reports the flatpak size as 3.5 GiB while fastfetch reports the flatpak partition as 3.4 GIB.
EDIT2: This is after installing yuzu:
It actually grew considerably for yuzu, yuzu appimage itself is 60 MiB compressed 170 MiB uncompressed.