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Comment by udev4096 | Hacker News Reader

Flatpak wants to download a gazillion dependencies before the actual package. And even the original package size is huge, compared to apk, deb, rpm, etc. Stop with the bloat. Native package managers are always going to be fast, easy to use and have a minimal size

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> Native package managers are always going to be fast, easy to use and have a minimal size

They become necessary when you are dealing with Windows style "applications" that drag in enormous amounts of dependency. I had Libreoffice fall over on Void Linux because of some JVM issue. You think I want to debug a JVM issue in 2020-something to type some text? No thanks - flatpak.

> Flatpak wants to download a gazillion dependencies before the actual package

Ah yes unlike other package managers that magically make applications not need dependencies.

I know this was sarcasm, but my experience is that I download much less with Debian's APT than I did with Flatpak.

I can think of two explanations: (1) Debian packages have more shared parts, and (2) they have optional dependencies ("recommends" and "suggests") which I disable by default. Because of (1), there will be many library packages to download, but the overall volume is reduced.

Standard Debian packages share their dependencies. Every Flatpak package is a special snowflake with its own dependencies. That's the point of it. But it makes download and install sizes enormous.

Flatpaks also share dependencies. Usually not quite as much as distro-specific packages, but it's wrong to suggest that each Flatpak ships all dependencies separately.

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