Re: F37 Change Proposal: Unfiltered Flathub (System-Wide Change)

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Timothée Ravier wrote:
> The two articles mentioned above all full of errors and misconceptions
> about how Flatpak and Flathub works.
> 
> See
> https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2022/05/16/response-to-flatpak-is-not-the-future.html

Oh, I know that "response". That response fails to convincingly address any 
of the criticism in the "Flatpak is not the Future" article.

Let me just go through the first section, "Size":

Section introduction:
* The response first tries to explain away the problem, trying to tell us
  why it is so bad to use host libraries (contrary to the best practices
  Fedora has been trying to promote all this time).
* Then it explains that we do not in fact have a 900 MB calculator, but
  "only" a 550 MB calculator, as if that were any more acceptable.

Sharing Runtimes:
The response seriously tries to sell us "113 MB out of 498 MB were 
deduplicated" (less than ¼) and "388 MB out of 715 MB were deduplicated" 
(about half) as a success of deduplication. (That is still a 75% resp. 50% 
space waste compared to having just one runtime.)

Storage Usage:
"Only 13.07 GB are used with deduplication", LOL, enough said! Though, if 
you insist on percentages, "13.07 GB are used with deduplication" vs. "36.22 
GB without" means that 64% are saved and 36% are still used if you have an 
incredible "57 runtimes". (Fewer runtimes also mean less opportunity to 
deduplicate.) Still, 57 times 36% is still a factor of more than 20, i.e., 
the proliferation of runtimes means you need 20 times the space for runtimes 
that a single shared runtime (as in the RPM world) would need.

"Disk space is cheap!":
* The criticism was that this no longer holds, which seems obvious looking
  at current prices. Yet, the response still tries to explain that away by
  claiming that "flash storage have higher physical density than hard drives
  because of built-in compression and deduplication". But no amount of
  compression and deduplication can increase the worst-case size of the disk 
  that can be relied on, because it only works on data that is compressible
  or duplicate.
* The response then proceeds to showing gains on Flatpak data from
  partition-level deduplication and compression (which is not actually a
  feature of flash storage at all, but of the in-kernel file system). That
  there is anything to be gained at all from partition-level deduplication
  just shows that Flatpak's own deduplication is nowhere near as effective
  as advertised. And partition-level compression is 1. slow and 2. can also
  be done just as effectively on software installed from RPMs (so it is not
  fair to compare compressed Flatpak installations with uncompressed RPM
  installations for size).

Memory Usage, Startup Time:
The response starts with "This is assuming the user has the same 
applications installed on the system and as a Flatpak and wants to load 
both.", which is a false assertion. In order to share libraries in memory, 
the applications need not be the same, they just need to use the same 
libraries, e.g., Qt, GTK, etc., and they typically do. So the whole two 
response paragraphs that follow are invalid (due to being deduced from this 
false premise).

I can take apart the rest when I have more time, but you should get the 
idea.

        Kevin Kofler
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