This was supposed to be a Flatpak rant. I know that the downloads use to be huge. But I just checked a few apps that I downloaded the appimage and somewhere along the way the flatpak has become much smaller than in the past. I checked Krita and Kdenlive and the file size reduction is dramatic.
I’ve uninstalled Flatpak completely at one point regaining 10GB. When I had a slower connection I’d wonder why a Flatbak download took so long. Here I wrote about the Bitwarden Flatpack that was a 1 GB download. And the Appimage was 90.3MB. That’s over 10 times bigger. The Flatpak download today is a much more reasonable 124.8MB. The Flatpak is version 1.32.1 the Appimage is version 1.33. At least that’s what the appstore says. Perhaps it actually downloads the current flathub version which is listed as 2023.1.1 released on 1/13/2023.
My Krita Appimage is 348.4MB the Flatpak today is listed as 178.9MB. However the Krita Appimage is version 5.1.1 and the Flatpak is version is 5.0.6.
I think the diet is relatively recent, because I’m pretty sure I checked some Flatpak program within the last few…maybe 6 months, and they were still huge. Because of their excessive size, I wouldn’t use them. Now I certainly will consider them.
Perhaps the large size was a Flatpak Linux Mint issue. All I know is I’m very happy that they are much smaller now.