this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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It's an immutable/atomic version of Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/
My understanding is that the core system is immutable (read-only) and major upgrades essentially just swap out that whole layer. Updates are atomic, meaning the entire thing either succeeds or fails and you can never end up with a broken half-updated system. UI apps all run using Flatpak.
I've never tried it though!
Ew Flatpak. Feels like an OS inside an OS. And it also feels bloated. Like almost one GB just to install an emulator.
The quoted storage figures for Flatpaks are misleading. They don't use that much. I have 50+ Flatpaks installed and they use barely more than 2.4GB.
And Flatpaks are great. There's nothing to ew at.
Are you sure they are using 2.4 GiB? because that's nowhere near what I've gotten: https://imgur.com/MjExYMB (notice flatpak-dedup-checker is being used)
EDIT:
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/994
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1651
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/46
https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak.github.io/issues/191
Their numbers sound questionable, but if you weren’t pulling in KDE yours would be significantly lower too.
The whole plasma DE meta package on arch is 1.1 GiB. It will be lower indeed but I don't think it is that significant? (Unless flatpak has a surprise here lol)
edit: iirc the app that really blew the overall size in that screenshot was libreoffice btw.
It's actually more than it, you can get to the point of having something like several different OS inside the OS because it might start having several different versions of big dependencies like mesa.
you want your application to work everywhere, that's why flatpak is needed, no one complains about nix, when they have the same principle, flatpak is just more distro-agnostic and with a more powerful sandbox