Thoughts on Flatpaks and AppImages

I wonder if our reluctance to install them stems from the days when we were particularly mindful of how much space we used up?....small hard drives etc...?
While true that storage isn't much of a big deal today, as, say a 250 GB HDD/SDD isn't that expensive and most new PCs would ship with such drives, I think the point is that it doesn't make much sense (to me at least) waste 2 GB to install a 27 MB app, that's just too much if you ask me. A few months ago I was interested in knowing how snaps, flatpacks and appimages handle resources; RAM usage, disk space usage, CPU ... I used ksnip https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip for that purpose, it's available in all of those formats, so in a Buster VM I installed snapd, flatpack and the respective ksnip pkg for each, downloaded the appimage and compare the three of them:
Installing snapd and ksnip snap pkg used as much as 600 MB of disk space.
Installing flackpack and ksnip flatpack pkg used as much as 1.8 GB of disk space.
The appimage is just a 27 MB pkg.
It's also available via backports, has very few dependencies, and it's around 50 MB if you install it that way; they all do the same job and ship with the same features set. So I don't think it is a matter of having enough space but rather that it simply is too much for installing such a small pkg, I can only imagine how much space will a pkg like LibreOffice will use if installed via snap or flatpack, via a pkg manager; apt, zypper, pacman, dnf it usually uses as much as 600-700 MB, how much would those use? Based on my findings using ksnip, I can only guess a LO snap would use as much as 3 GB and flatpack would as much as 6 GB! Maybe it isn't as big but if it is, that's just crazy! Regarding RAM and CPU usage the 3 used pretty much the same with the appimage doing it slightly better than the snap and flatpack pkg, but better nonetheless.
 
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The snap pkg used as much as 600 MB of disk space.
The flackpack pkg used as much as 1.8 GB of disk space.
The appimage is just a 27 MB pkg.

Thank you for this. I noticed something similar (can't remember the program now) when comparing snap size to a normal package, although in discover it says "plus dependencies" so I wasn't sure if the comparison was a bit OTT. Those are staggering stats.

The only justification for those stats (forgetting the flatpak because wtf) is if the appimage employed some form of massive compression/decompression or streamed required data from online servers.

Flatpaks must be coded by me in JS, whilst drunk, filled with comments, useless variables, and other inefficiencies. They put it through a JS minifier to create the snap, and they use a human minifier on SE's 'code golf' to create the appimage.
 
Thank you for this. I noticed something similar (can't remember the program now) when comparing snap size to a normal package, although in discover it says "plus dependencies" so I wasn't sure if the comparison was a bit OTT. Those are staggering stats.
Well, I do have to say that those numbers correspond to the whole thing; installing snapd and ksnip, not only ksnip, the same goes for flatpack, however, it still is too much IMO.
 
I haven't looked much into Snaps, Flatpaks and Appimages much but if I were to start using one of the three I would go with Flatpaks because that way I have some sort of command for managing all my Flatpak applications instead of having to manually manage everything with AppImages. Or are there tools for managing AppImages, seems there are tools for managing AppImages but haven't come across any so far?
 
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I know that Snaps check twice a day for updates and automatically update themselves. They also keep the previous version in case the newer one is screwed up. My understanding is that it should automatically revert to the previous version when/if it detects an error.

I still have yet to use a single Snap app. I really should learn more about them.
 

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