Question about runtimes

[Daniel Wilkins]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 03:23:33PM +0100, Mark Naughton wrote:
> When you install a flatpak, why does it download the entire runtime? Why
> not just download the needed dependencies like a normal package manager?
Because it saves network bandwidth and disk space ;)

When you have a linux distro it's a curated set of packages chosen and
integrated by the distro maker. Flatpak is (hopefully) straight from
upstream. If flatpaks listed their actual dependencies, every flatpak
might require a different version of a ton of libraries, causing a lot
of duplication. The idea of runtimes is that they should (hopefully)
release relatively rarely and so between all of your flatpaks you
should hopefully just have one or two gnome runtimes, one or two kde
runtimes.

Hope this makes sense,
Danny