Flatpak has the concept of a Runtime which contains low-level dependencies that multiple applications can depend on. Runtimes are useful to avoid duplication (imagine all gtk apps bundling their own Gtk) and to deliver updates (imagine a CVE was found in a core library that many apps depend on).

All in all, when you are downloading a Flatpak application from GNOME Software that depends on a runtime that you still don't have locally, it will pull the runtime alongside it. Thus the big download-size numbers you have.

So, for instance, when you downloaded the flatpak of a GNOME app, it will likely pull org.gnome.Platform for the first time if you still don't have it. The other GNOME apps you'd install afterwards will have a much smaller download-size.

For more details, see https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2017/10/02/on-application-sizes-and-bloat-in-f...

We have failed to communicate that in the UI in GNOME Software, but that's something that has been discussed/worked on at the moment.

On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 10:33 AM Michal Konecny mkonecny@redhat.com wrote:

You can see the same behavior on flatpak itself. The download size is often much larger than actual size. I think the gnome software can't have better values till the flatpak itself figures this out.

mkonecny

On 26/02/19 21:17, Chris Murphy wrote:

...

Fedora 29 Workstation

I'm finding a weak pattern when source is dl.flathub.org. A significant minority of dl.flathub.org apps report rather huge download sizes, and two or three orders magnitude smaller installation size. I'm not seeing this for other sources, even for the same app. A sample:

atom source dl.flathub.org installed size 521.4 MB download size 4.7 GB

geany source dl.flathub.org installed size 7.5 MB download size 4.8 GB

builder source dl.flathub.org installed size 123 MB download size 4.8 GB

builder source fedoraproject.org download size 11.7 MB

visual studio code - OSS source dl.flathub.org installed size 235.7 MB download size 2.0 GB

android studio source dl.flathub.org installed size 422.4 kB download size 5.8 GB

Is this a known bug? If not, what information is needed to file a bug report? I can't imagine downloading this much data for one app, but then it ends up not really needing this much storage space? That doesn't seem possible.

Thanks,

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