this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Don't know about Snap, but Flatpak download sizes decrease significantly after installing the main platform libraries, they can become really small; of course that's pretty much fully negated if you're installing Electron apps, but even then 500MB isn't very accurate, more like 150MB on average
Yes I hate it, what is even more annoying is that you can do
flatpak install someapp
and it will search matches on its own, it shows them to you to let you decide, but after that you can't doflatpak run someapp
because it "doesn't exist"Last one could easily be fixed tho
Hopefully it would be fixed upstream on the actual flatpak command, but do you know if there are wrappers for it already?
No. If I have to launch a flatpak through the terminal, I always just do
flatpak list
and copy the ID or whatever it's calledThere's a nice program called flattool that solves the name issue
Is it this one?
It looks excellent, ~~any idea why it's not on Flathub yet?~~ Never mind, I got it:
Snaps have a similar deduplication mechanism, and snaps allows calling apps from their names like you would do with regular packages.
I think the reason for the second one is that while snaps are also meant to be used in servers/cli flatpak is built only with desktop GUI apps in mind.
Then you do a
flatpak list
and it abbreviates the shit out of the identifiers so you can't use them either. Whoever designed that UX needs to lean back an contemplate life a bit.Well that comes down to your terminal size, you have to filter the columns if your screen is too small: docs
Sure, it's possible. I can also use
flatpak list -d
to show everything. But the combination of these defaults is just fucked up UX (require the full id for certain operations, but don't always show the full id by default).Yeah honestly they could have avoided putting Branch, Origin and Installation if there isn't enough space available.
The CLI definitely needs some polishing, not to mention
flatpak update
breaking horrendously on scrollbackYes, sizes might be inaccurate - it's been about a year last time I tried snap or flatpak. All I remember is that snap installs around 300 mb gtk3 runtime and it's often 2 or more of them, because different snaps might rely on different gtk versions + other dependencies.
And I remember that when snap and flatpak compared, allegedly flatpak requires more storage space.
I am aware that runtime sizes doesn't scale with number of packages past maybe 3-4, but I have only 4 appimages on my system right now and they take ~200 mb, it is absurd that I'd need 10 times more space allocated for the same (or worse) functionality.