While true that storage isn't much of a big deal today, as, say a 250 GB HDD/SDD isn't that expensive and most new PCs would ship with such drives, I think the point is that it doesn't make much sense (to me at least) waste 2 GB to install a 27 MB app, that's just too much if you ask me. A few months ago I was interested in knowing how snaps, flatpacks and appimages handle resources; RAM usage, disk space usage, CPU ... I used ksnip https://github.com/ksnip/ksnip for that purpose, it's available in all of those formats, so in a Buster VM I installed snapd, flatpack and the respective ksnip pkg for each, downloaded the appimage and compare the three of them:I wonder if our reluctance to install them stems from the days when we were particularly mindful of how much space we used up?....small hard drives etc...?
Installing snapd and ksnip snap pkg used as much as 600 MB of disk space.
Installing flackpack and ksnip flatpack pkg used as much as 1.8 GB of disk space.
The appimage is just a 27 MB pkg.
It's also available via backports, has very few dependencies, and it's around 50 MB if you install it that way; they all do the same job and ship with the same features set. So I don't think it is a matter of having enough space but rather that it simply is too much for installing such a small pkg, I can only imagine how much space will a pkg like LibreOffice will use if installed via snap or flatpack, via a pkg manager; apt, zypper, pacman, dnf it usually uses as much as 600-700 MB, how much would those use? Based on my findings using ksnip, I can only guess a LO snap would use as much as 3 GB and flatpack would as much as 6 GB! Maybe it isn't as big but if it is, that's just crazy! Regarding RAM and CPU usage the 3 used pretty much the same with the appimage doing it slightly better than the snap and flatpack pkg, but better nonetheless.
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