Size of additional software

General Help
1

Hello,

After installing Zorin OS Core I went to install some additional software and I found, to my great surprise, that even software apparently simply had a huge download size, with a tiny installed size.

How is it possible?

For example:

  • "Notepad Next" has download size of 848 MB and installed size of 5 MB
  • "Drawing" has download size of 760 MB and installed size of 6 MB

These are the equivalent of Notepad++ and Paint in Windows, so a small program, so why is the downloads hundreds of MB?

2

It's due to flat and snap packages that needs extra libs to be downloaded. When the extra libs are downloaded and you install other flat or snap packages the download shouldn't be so big.

That's why we are some that avoid flat/snap when possible.

1 Like
3

Users often wonder about this size issue with Flatpak. That's a total of several packages.

Using "Drawing" as an example, the download size of that program is actually just 5.5 MB (see below). The rest is the gnome runtime needed to support it. When additional Flatpak applications are installed that use that same gnome runtime, the runtime won't be downloaded with them. They all use the one already installed.

  ID: com.github.maoschanz.drawing
  Ref: app/com.github.maoschanz.drawing/x86_64/stable
  Arch: x86_64
  Branch: stable
  Collection: org.flathub.Stable
  Download: 5.5 MB    
  Installed: 6.4 MB
  Runtime: org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/42

Notpad Next is a KDE application, so can't share the gnome runtime. It needs the KDE runtime to be installed, and since you don't have that already, the larger initial total download. By itself, Notepad Next download is only 2.1 MB. That's all you would download if KDE runtime was already installed.

KDE runtime when installed uses 846 MB
Gnome runtime when installed uses 754 MB

4

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