Yeah storage is cheap but I last reformated my boot drive in 2017 so my root partition is 20GB and now I have no room for Flatpak. Now I could just resize it but wheres the fun in that.
TL:DR “A 20GB root partition ought to be enough for anybody.”
You can have flatpak install it’s stuff into your home with the --user flag.
I feel your pain. Flatpack can really ruin partitioning strategies.
It has an installations feature to use any location, as well as users home by default.
Before I realized you could install as user and have it install on your home drive I just symlinked the install directory where i wanted to.
To be fair it’s 2024 and I’m still doing this, because adding an alternate location to install flatpaks in results in Flatseal not being able to detect those apps or edit those permissions. Just setting the default location as a symlink to where I want to magically fixes everything.
I use Flatpaks mostly because I like having my base os and gui minimal as possible. Every thinking that is not core os I install as a flatpak. This is great because I didn’t have to install dependencies like lib32 and other libraries on my root partition. Lean and mean.
But doesnt each flatpak is packed with its own dependencies? So bascially you have the same dependency over and over.
No, each runtime is only used once. You only get duplicates for apps that use different runtimes or for dependencies that are bundled in the app.