So I recently installed Cachyos and I am now met with this problem.
There are kind of 2 main contenders here and I’m split between them. What do you use?
There is pacman + aur and then there is flatpak. Pacman has deep system integration and is much more lightweight but it has deep system integration and requires sudo to install. flatpak has sandboxing and easy permission management but it’s bloated and possibly less performant?
Of course if the package isn’t available on flathub then I will have to use the aur but when both are available it’s hard to decide.
What do you mean by “bloated”? How many more bytes does the flatpak version have compared to its counterpart?
I did a quick search and for steam the pacman package installed size is 19mb while the flathub package installed size is 51mb.
That’s actually a way bigger difference than I thought it would be.
If 40 MB is important to you then it seems like a no brainer to use pacman.
Depends on the program, they don’t use system libraries so if they have a lot of dependencies then they’ll be larger.
An example:
Steam Flatpak: 35MB
Steam pacman: 19MB
On one hand, it’s only a few MB. On the other hand, it’s 54% larger.
Flatpaks can also depend on other flatpaks. For example, graphics card support requires about 1-1.5GB of flatpak dependencies even though your system already has graphics card drivers.
I just don’t understand how people still use Flatpak.
Once I had to download a small app 400kB more or less, and suddenly it started downloading 200MB of environment packages.
Never again.