I’ve run out of space on / and discovered that Flatpak is a space hog.
I don’t have really much things installed. Most of them are some dependencies, among which is 2.7Gb of Fedora. Why? Why promote such inefficient distribution method that can not even take advantage of the already installed binary blobs?
s flatpak list --columns name,size
Name Installed size
Shortwave 8,2 MB
Kooha 4,9 MB
Audacity 58,0 MB
Fedora Platform 2,7 GB
Mesa 424,2 MB
Mesa (Extra) 424,2 MB
Intel 46,5 MB
openh264 790,0 kB
GNU Image Manipulation Program 252,8 MB
GNOME Application Platform version 43 864,0 MB
GNOME Application Platform version 44 860,6 MB
Would you be able to determine the runtime being utilized by executing the following command in a shell environment?
flatpak list --columns=name,runtime,size
This command will display a list of installed Flatpak applications along with their respective runtime and size. In some cases, you can remove Fedora Platform because it is pinned but not used by any apps.
Mesa is not removable. If you want to free up space, try removing other unused packages with the following command:
flatpak remove --unused
Moreover, if you still wish to use Audacity, you can reinstall it without the Fedora platform. This can be done using the command below, which explicitly tells Flatpak to acquire Audacity from the flathub repository:
flatpak install flathub org.audacityteam.Audacity
When installing a Flatpak app, you’re sometimes asked if you want to install it from the fedora repository or the flathub repository. If you choose fedora, Flatpak will install the Fedora platform runtime, which can consume more space than desired. This is why you might prefer installing from flathub instead.
flatpak install org.audacityteam.Audacity
Looking for matches…
Remotes found with refs similar to ‘org.audacityteam.Audacity’:
1) ‘fedora’ (system)
2) ‘flathub’ (system)
Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-2]:
If you want to avoid this issue in the future, consider disabling the Fedora repository permanently. You can do this in Gnome Software by navigating to Software Repositories. KDE Discover should have a similar setting.
Disabled these repos permanently. Overall I don’t think Flatpaks is a good packaging solution. Better leverage GitHub - whalebrew/whalebrew: Homebrew, but with Docker images with podman and convert those Flatpak definitions into more secure and less space hungry containers.