Love installing multiple gigabyte flatpaks of what would be 15mb exe files on Windows. I've enjoyed using Mint so far but there are definitely some things that suck, this is one of them

all 20 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 days ago (1 children)

For some reason Mint hates flatpaks by claiming they're giant, when they really aren't.

Most of the "size" comes from core dependencies, which do take up space. However, Flatpak comes as part of Mint, and the few dependecies not included do take some space. But definitely not what Mint Store reports.

I'd write it up to Synaptic package manager being a bit lazy and just downloading the entire list of dependencies and running with it, instead of checkig what the flatpak package manager will actually download.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

In that case, I retract my complaint, but they really should communicate the actual size better. I had nothing else to go off of so I assumed what the manager was saying was true.

Here's another minor complaint: I wish customisation was better. With Windows, you can easily pick a colour that gets applied to the taskbar, start menu, title bars, etc, but with Cinnamon at least you're stuck with white, gray and black with minor splashes of colour. There's also themes you can download but there's not too many of them and it's not exactly a rainbow of exciting colourways, most being more variations of grey and black. Apparently you can also edit a .css file somewhere but I'm a big dumdum that wants a nice colour wheel I can click on

[–] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

No. It's a perfectly valid complaint, just pointed in the wrong direction perhaps.

About Cinammon: it isn't customizable because that isn't really why it exists. Its purpose is to have a lightweight, evocative-of-Windows desktop environment.

If you'd like a heavily customizable DE, the default choice is (KDE) Plasma. You can install it on Mint without a problem. There are plenty of guides, and this one seems a bit more concise than the other few I've checked.

My recommendation if you do check it out, however, is to use the "desktop" package (as opposed to the guide's "standard"). You'll just be missing out on KDE apps such as their text editor, but you already have one that works, and you can always install it manually.

Cinnamon is made by the Mint devs for Mint the distro. Plasma is made as a uber-featured DE for anyone. Which doesn't make Plasma any better, it's just that their goals are different.

Cinnamon values simplicity and low resource use, while plasma prefers complexity and customizability (which causes a bit of bloat).

[–] omegathrowaway@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

GNOME's "Characters" takes up 3.6 MB, install that one instead

[–] mx_oceanwater_they_them@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

There are other emoji-picker software out there. Some even work in the terminal. fzf fuzzy finder with a list of emoji as input works as well.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Going to check this out the next time I boot to Linux

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

Checkout Smile too. GNOME characters is more of a Unicode character finder than an emoji picker.

[–] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Print disk usage for Emote

It's in Portuguese sorry, but anyway is 2.6mb total installed and is flatpak too. Maybe try to report to the Mint store, it's probably a bug.

Edit: If you install the app you can run the cmd: flatpak info --show-location com.tomjwatson.Emote to see where is installed and investigate what on earth is 4gb

[–] TrueStalinistPatriot@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago

Well that's what flatpak is about... It looks like gnome thing it probably downloaded a bunch of gnome dependencies as well which explains the size.

The cool thing is you don't have to use flatpak

[–] tim_curry@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I wouldn’t be the first to say flatpaks are efficient but I’ve never seen one that big

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

In my experience they're all about this bloated, at least for the programs I use

[–] tim_curry@hexbear.net 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Mine are about the size I'd expect them to be tbh emilie-shrug

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

a lot of those could be a lot smaller if they weren't needlessly electron apps.

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Wait, do they actually end up taking up less space than what the package manager says? In the package manager it says duckstation takes like 3 gigs or whatever

[–] Inui@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yes. Stuff like Gnome software will show the total size of the flatpaks before deduplication and sharing dependencies with your other flatpaks. If you installed this as your only flatpak, it would be huge. But if you primarily use flatpaks like I do on my atomic system, they become smaller with each one as they share common components.

[–] ProletarianDictator@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago

Yeah your first flatpak is huge because it needs all the deps, then subsequent flatpaks are more reasonably sized if they use the same SDK.

[–] tim_curry@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Idk I don’t use the store I’m a cli goblin you can run

flatpak list --columns=name,application,size,installation

To see the sizes. They come with dependencies so probably those are counted but they’re shared if they’re the same dependency across multiple apps

Yeah I guess its this

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 11 points 2 days ago

Why does it say 3,6 GB when the website says only 2.46 MiB?

Taking libraries into account?

[–] giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 days ago

must be the new 8k versions