The folder var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects has 7gb. Is that normal?

My Zorin 17.1 tells me that my system partition (22gb) is almost full. The var/lib/flatpak/repo/objects folder has 7gb. I don't know what is there? There are also a lot of icons and stuff in most of the folders that I can't assign. Could these also be files from Wine? I have installed winetricks and installed quite a lot here.
How can I gain disk space here?
Many thanks for your help.

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

Unfortunately, this is to be expected.

The reason behind that is due to a package format used in Linux (one of many, anyway) called Flatpak. As with most things, there are pros and cons, and you've stumbled upon one of the cons which is that they take a lot of storage space.
By today's standards, some would argue that this isn't really all that much, but that is a very relative since not everyone has massive drives or even the same storage needs.

How to handle this can be tricky. I would suggest spending some time reading through these related threads. It will give you an idea of what are your options and how to handle them.

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Hello and thanks for the answer,
this is really annoying as I installed zorin only a month ago and now everything is running so far that I am satisfied. I chose the partition size as I have been getting along very well with Kubuntu for a long time.
I guess I'll have to do all that â– â– â– â–  again now to make my system partition bigger.
I haven't installed much:

flatpak list
N… Anwendungskennung Version                 Zweig        Ursprung Installation
D… …m.dropbox.Client 209.4.3661              stable       flathub  system
N… …client.nextcloud 3.14.1                  stable       flathub  system
S… …m.spotify.Client 1.2.45.454.gc16ec9f6    stable       flathub  system
B… …ebottles.bottles 51.13                   stable       flathub  system
F… …desktop.Platform freedesktop-sdk-24.08.2 24.08        flathub  system
M… …tform.GL.default 24.2.3                  23.08        flathub  system
M… …tform.GL.default 24.2.3                  23.08-extra  flathub  system
M… …tform.GL.default 24.2.3                  24.08        flathub  system
M… …tform.GL.default 24.2.3                  24.08extra   flathub  system
M… …orm.GL32.default 24.2.3                  23.08        flathub  system
I… …form.VAAPI.Intel                         23.08        flathub  system
I… …form.VAAPI.Intel                         24.08        flathub  system
f… …form.ffmpeg-full                         23.08        flathub  system
i… …ffmpeg_full.i386                         23.08        flathub  system
o… …latform.openh264 2.4.1                   2.4.1        flathub  system
G… org.gimp.GIMP     2.10.38                 stable       flathub  system
G… …g.gnome.Platform                         46           flathub  system
G… …g.gnome.Platform                         47           flathub  system
i… …form.Compat.i386                         46           flathub  system
Z… …e.ZorinBlue-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… ….ZorinBlue-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… ….ZorinGreen-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …ZorinGreen-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …e.ZorinGrey-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… ….ZorinGrey-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …ZorinOrange-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …orinOrange-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …ZorinPurple-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …orinPurple-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …me.ZorinRed-Dark                         3.22         zorinos  system
Z… …e.ZorinRed-Light                         3.22         zorinos  system
K… org.kde.Platform                          6.7          flathub  system
Q… …waitaDecorations                         6.7          flathub  system
D… …q.Wine.DLLs.dxvk 2.4.1                   stable-23.08 flathub  system
G… …inehq.Wine.gecko                         stable-23.08 flathub  system
M… …winehq.Wine.mono                         stable-23.08 flathub  system

You could try with "flatsweep" to clean out leftovers from previous installed flatpaks.

That's what I did. But there were still no old installations.

If you're limited on space, Flatpak (and Snap and AppImage) are not the way to go, as their entire reason for existing is to pre-bundle dependencies for the software so that they run on as many linux systems as possible - but this bundling results in eating a lot of your storage. It's not even possible to tell beforehand a lot of the time, as the sizes shown in gnome Software and KDE's equivalent are just for that app itself, not the supporting runtimes and other bits that will also be downloaded if you don't already have them from other Flatpaks you installed previously.

In gnome Software, a lot of apps will have a little drop-down menu near the install button where you can pick which packaging format to use. Here's an example from my Fedora system:

image

The gnome devs are famously anti-user and so not only do they prioritise anything and everything over native packages, they don't actually expose the setting to change it in the GUI.

You can, however, tell it to prioritise native packages via terminal commands if you want. I wrote about it in another thread here:

You can then look at backing up the config directories of your installed Flatpaks and try to replace as many as possible with native packages.

Also, try running flatpak remove --unused every now and then to clear out anything that gets left behind between updates and manually uninstalling software. Until recently, there was a bug (that the devs tried very hard to not admit to) where old nvidia runtimes would not be uninstalled automatically and would just accumulate on your computer, and even after running flatpak remove --unused only the 64bit versions would be removed; you had to manually uninstall all their 32bit counterparts. This is now, thankfully, fixed, but I can't remember which version of Flatpak fixed this.

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Good guide on keeping var clean here: