How do you guys get software that is not in your distribution’s repositories?

  • Possibly linux
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    2510 months ago

    App images are a very Windows way to do things. They bundle everything so they are big

      • @[email protected]
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        1010 months ago

        Then again, loads of apps share that runtime. And if other runtimes have same stuff as that GNOME runtime, the shared parts are on your disk only once. It’s pretty smart in how it works.

        • @[email protected]
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          710 months ago

          Ran out of space on a 30GB partition when trying around 10 smallish programs as flatpaks. Runtimes are shared in theory but not in practice.

          • @[email protected]
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            10 months ago

            If you allocate 30 GB for / that seems pretty low these days for a desktop system. If you don’t have much space, it’s always best to go with regular repository packages

            Here someone had 163 flatpaks and it used 8,7GB in runtimes. So I’m guessing the 30GB number is for whole of /.

            I just checked out mine, I have 34 apps and runtimes use 3,1GB

            Runtimes are shared in theory but not in practice.

            I think three runtimes (newest freedesktop, KDE and GNOME) cover 90% of my flatpaks. Then there’s programs that use some EOL’d runtime and never get updated, which sucks

          • @[email protected]
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            10 months ago

            You should test it out with those 33 installed as flatpak. If you end up with 4.7GB for runtimes, that’s basically nothing these days as far as storage goes for that amount of programs. More you have, more you benefit from shared runtimes. I doubt it’ll be less than AppImages but it’s usually the starting runtime space use that shocks people.

            Here someone tested it with 163 flatpaks and the runtimes used 8.7GB. With the top 5 most used runtimes covering 128 of those flatpaks.

            https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/

            I just checked out mine, I have 34 apps and runtimes use 3,1GB

            It doesn’t matter if they share if in the end they end up using several times more storage than the appimage equivalent.

            Well we are talking about two gigs, after all. Unless you’re using an embedded system, it’s not a much of a concern if you ask me. But it is more, true

              • @[email protected]
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                110 months ago

                Yes but that wasn’t the original comment I replied to was about.

                I know this doesn’t matter these days but once again that wasn’t what the original comment was about.

                I agree, it was just about the size differences. I just think it’s good to bring up since there’s many confused about the flatpak size use. Often people might want to install some small app and they’re hit with gigs of stuff and come off thinking that’s the same for every app, which would be insane of course.

                WAIT I just took a deeper look at the link, isn’t that guy just showing the runtimes without the applications using 8.7 GiB?

                Yes it’s specifically comparing runtimes. Same for my number, I was calculating how much the runtimes used.

    • @[email protected]
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      910 months ago

      They are windows, but the linux version of dll-hell across distros and distro versions makes windows dll hell look quaint.

      If someone had addressed that better it would be one thing, but binary interoperability is infinitely broken, so app image is actually an improvement.