Flatpak is eating too much space and duplicates Fedora files

Project Discussion
1

I’ve run out of space on / and discovered that Flatpak is a space hog.

image

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
2

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.

3

Fedora was used by Audacity, so I removed it. The rest of the list.

$ flatpak list --columns=name,runtime,size 
Name                                                Runtime                                   Installed size
Shortwave                                           org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/44                8,2 MB
Kooha                                               org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/43                4,9 MB
Mesa                                                                                          424,2 MB
Mesa (Extra)                                                                                  424,2 MB
Intel                                                                                          46,5 MB
openh264                                                                                      790,0 kB
GNU Image Manipulation Program                      org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/44              254,4 MB
GNOME Application Platform version 43                                                         864,0 MB
GNOME Application Platform version 44                                                         860,6 MB

It looks like Mesa is removable, but it is not.

Info: applications using the extension org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default branch 22.08:
   io.github.seadve.Kooha, de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave, org.gimp.GIMP
4

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.

Screenshot from 2023-07-12 02-16-34

5

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.