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Flatpak uses OSTree, like Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite etc) and similar to BTRFS snapshots.
So many files are deduplicated and linked, not actually there
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
A lot of that data doesn't actually exist, ostree hardlinks data blobs internally, so the actual size on disk is much smaller than most disk usage tools will show.
Thanks! The same goes for ostree system versions and BTRFS snapshots probably.
I have a similar problem with virt-manager and I think that doesnt create dynamically allocated qcow2 containers?
What does "ostree hardlinks data blobs internally" mean?
Flatpak uses OSTree - a git-like system for storing and transferring binary data (commonly referred to as 'blobs'), and that system works by addressing such blobs by hashes of their content, using Linux hardlinks (multiple inodes all referring to the same disk blocks) to refer to the same data everywhere it's used.
So basically, whenever Flatpak tells OSTree to download something, it will only ever store only copy of that same object (.so-file, binary, font, etc), regardless of how many times it's used by applications across the install.
Note that this only happens internally in the OSTree repo - i.e. /var/lib/flatpak or ~/.local/share/flatpak, so if you have multiple separate Flatpak installations on your system then they can't automagically de-duplicate data between each other.
Thank you for the explanation.
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
here a script to compare the size without or with deduplication
Thanks!
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
And I have to say I have many apps. Not as many anymore, and no EOL runtimes apart Onionshare anymore.
I think at one point I had like 2.5 tb of stuff stored on my 2 tb drive in my laptop, deduplication and btrfs compression is fun
Flatlack is weird. Sometimes it's really good, but then other times depending on what you install it really bloons up.
Those are unmaintained apps and you probably shouldnt use them. Poorly this is not as obvious and cant be enforced.
One gotcha is installing both as user and root, getting two sets of dependencies. I only found out after a year or so of consciously using flatpak.
I'm now taking care to make sure I only use flatpak as root. Maybe not the most secure.
Removing /repo is not considered safe, but I just removed its contents anyways and then just ran a repair.
That actually resulted in more available disk space than after running the garbage collection.
And my flatpak apps still work 🤷♀️
I can't tell if this is the new "Delete System32" or not.
no, that'd be deleting /boot, /usr or /var
Why not /? 😁
because then it also deletes your personal files which is not equivalent to deleting System32
Weird?
Why use flatpak?
Because its a modern package system that is free, focused on making every app run, has isolation, sandboxing and a permission system
And brings the most recent version of something to any system. I'm astounded sometimes by how much a native package can lag behind
Convenient libraries/frameworks are fat. Because they are fat, they need frequent updates/security fixes, breaking codebase more often. With flatpack, developers can freeze lib versions at a convenient point, without caring for system dependencies.