KDE Discover Making Progress With Flatpak Support

[mike44]

krita works great with it's appimage support

[bug77]

Not quite. flatpak is based on ostree which does deduplication at the file level.

What does that mean? If user A wants to install app X, flatpak will detect it's already installed in user B's home and not actually write it on the disk again, but only write deltas if it's not the exact same version?

[theghost]

krita works great with it's appimage support

Fine, but this article is about flatpak support in KDE Discover.

[ebassi]

What does that mean? If user A wants to install app X, flatpak will detect it's already installed in user B's home and not actually write it on the disk again, but only write deltas if it's not the exact same version?

If it's inside a user's home, then no: every user flatpak repository is isolated.

Luckily, you can install applications and runtimes globally as well; so if application A installed by user X depends on runtime R, and user Y installs application B which also happens to depend on runtime R, there's only one copy of the run time installed. Additionally, if user X has both applications A and B installed and they bundle identical files, you only store one copy of each file instead of two.

[bug77]

If it's inside a user's home, then no: every user flatpak repository is isolated.

Luckily, you can install applications and runtimes globally as well; so if application A installed by user X depends on runtime R, and user Y installs application B which also happens to depend on runtime R, there's only one copy of the run time installed. Additionally, if user X has both applications A and B installed and they bundle identical files, you only store one copy of each file instead of two.

Yeah, but the initial assertion was that this will enable root-less application install. And that will keep everything in user's home.

[RahulSundaram]

Yeah, but the initial assertion was that this will enable root-less application install. And that will keep everything in user's home.

It does already handle root less application installation. If you install an application into your own home dir, that is isolated and not shared with other users but even within that home, if multiple applications depends on the same runtime or even bundled libraries, only a single copy is stored. If there are file level variations, the diff is stored. ostree is essentially git for applications.

[bug77]

It does already handle root less application installation. If you install an application into your own home dir, that is isolated and not shared with other users but even within that home, if multiple applications depends on the same runtime or even bundled libraries, only a single copy is stored. If there are file level variations, the diff is stored. ostree is essentially git for applications.

Right. So if several apps you install have stuff in common, it can detect that. But it can't do that if several users install the same application.
Please note that this is not me criticizing flatpack, it's me recalling a particular sore point when handling apps installed in user's home. Imho, that should be big no-no, at least on Linux, that already has a well defined folder hierarchy.

[anda_skoa]

Yeah, but the initial assertion was that this will enable root-less application install. And that will keep everything in user's home.

Not necessarily, depends a bit on the system's setup.
The admin could allow all or certain users to install into shared locations, e.g. /usr/local or /opt or a custom path, while still keeping the system installation protected for root-only write access.

Cheers,
_