Oh, okay. I just know about the translating thing and the sidebar

Forcing bullshit genai stuff into their browser

It’s an opt-in feature that just opens whatever AI service you picked, their website in a sidebar. You can even use your own local AI if you want to. Or not use it at all. But the AI isn’t actually in your browser any more than it is in your browser when you open their website in a tab.

If the translation thing counts as AI then that’s actually a really cool and more private use of it compared to querying a server. It can do the translation completely locally. Works pretty well too in my experience, though it does think for a moment when you tell it to translate.

I don’t think Firefox has any AI that they need to run for you. The language thing (if that counts) is local thing.

Nobody:

Yes but that wasn’t the original comment I replied to was about.

I know this doesn’t matter these days but once again that wasn’t what the original comment was about.

I agree, it was just about the size differences. I just think it’s good to bring up since there’s many confused about the flatpak size use. Often people might want to install some small app and they’re hit with gigs of stuff and come off thinking that’s the same for every app, which would be insane of course.

WAIT I just took a deeper look at the link, isn’t that guy just showing the runtimes without the applications using 8.7 GiB?

Yes it’s specifically comparing runtimes. Same for my number, I was calculating how much the runtimes used.

If you allocate 30 GB for / that seems pretty low these days for a desktop system. If you don’t have much space, it’s always best to go with regular repository packages

Here someone had 163 flatpaks and it used 8,7GB in runtimes. So I’m guessing the 30GB number is for whole of /.

I just checked out mine, I have 34 apps and runtimes use 3,1GB

Runtimes are shared in theory but not in practice.

I think three runtimes (newest freedesktop, KDE and GNOME) cover 90% of my flatpaks. Then there’s programs that use some EOL’d runtime and never get updated, which sucks

You should test it out with those 33 installed as flatpak. If you end up with 4.7GB for runtimes, that’s basically nothing these days as far as storage goes for that amount of programs. More you have, more you benefit from shared runtimes. I doubt it’ll be less than AppImages but it’s usually the starting runtime space use that shocks people.

Here someone tested it with 163 flatpaks and the runtimes used 8.7GB. With the top 5 most used runtimes covering 128 of those flatpaks.

https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/

I just checked out mine, I have 34 apps and runtimes use 3,1GB

It doesn’t matter if they share if in the end they end up using several times more storage than the appimage equivalent.

Well we are talking about two gigs, after all. Unless you’re using an embedded system, it’s not a much of a concern if you ask me. But it is more, true

If it works for you then it works, no need to switch it up. I guess one other way of doing it would be a persistent install on that USB.

Not a fan of AppImages myself. For an universal format it has surprising amount of issues with different distros, in my experience. And the whole Windows style “go to a website, download the AppImage, if you want to update it, go to the web page again and download it again” is one thing I wanted to get away from. At least they don’t come with install wizards, that clicking through menus thing was a pain.

For one off stuff I run once and never need again, AppImage is alright. But not being built-in with sandboxing, repos, all that stuff, it just seems like a step back.

Then again, loads of apps share that runtime. And if other runtimes have same stuff as that GNOME runtime, the shared parts are on your disk only once. It’s pretty smart in how it works.

I don’t remember what program it was, the dev explained it wasn’t available as flatpak because flatpaks are unsafe or something. Then the installation guide went “well anyway here’s curl | sudo bash.” Like, lmao. Talk about bad security practices.

Yeah

I’m not very concerned about looks

Hilarious if they are, they’d just be getting people to pay to use their own hardware

settle for some lukewarm side table water

Lmao

I’ve understood that “performance” in this sort of context mean how quickly a given task is done

I have hard time believing Plex’s software transcoding is more performant than Jellyfin’s hardware accelerated trandcoding

I think it’s an interesting approach. I much prefer flatpak but can’t say I’m curious what all-snap system would be like

The ads and the Amazon thing will follow Canonical forever

Hah, I used to