I read it is better than flatpak/appimage/snap.

"Adapting Snap on deepin: Since Snap has many compatibility issues except for Ubuntu, we gave up.
- Converting some of our homegrown apps to AppImage: AppImage has good portability, and these apps can easily be used on other distributions. However, it doesn’t have centralized repository storage and package management, and doesn’t provide the same level of sandboxing as Snap and Flatpak, so its security can’t be guaranteed, and it’s not suitable to be used as the default package management method for the operating system.
- In 2017, deepin followed up the Flatpak format and completed the construction of 100+ packages, but did not continue to adapt due to the large size of the application, excessive disk
occupation, slow bug fixing and other reasons. "
Did someone consider it as better alternative for these package formats or is this just “15 standard” for package formats because deepin wanted to make something.

Are there any distros which use it apart from deepin and which is packaged in this format, because I want to drop flatpak because it takes too much space on my system.


1 runtime is ≈1gb
24.08 1gb
2xQt 250 mb
2xGNOME 250 mb
25.08 1 gb
2xQt 250 mb
2xGNOME 250
It gets big fast.
If you have one app with outdated runtime it is additional 1 gb for just runtime. If you rely mostly on system packages most packages you install from flatpak will have additional weight of 1 gb runtime. So you can get app which weights 4mb with runtime which weight 250 more than app itself.
And other flatpak repos use other runtimes for example fedora.
Appimages weight much less but lack sandboxing.
I hadn’t tried nix but it also lacks sandboxing.
Were these numbers generated using compsize or a similar tool that asseses deduplication, symlinks, and compression properly?
I get much different numbers than I use one or the other.
gdu:
gdu ~ Use arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help --- /var/lib/flatpak --- 2.6 GiB ████████ ▏/runtime 471.7 MiB █▍ ▏/app 114.4 MiB ▎ ▏/repo 9.1 MiB ▏/appstream 164.0 KiB ▏/exports 0 B ▏.changedcompsize:
[moonpie@nefertem flatpak]$ sudo compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak Processed 73225 files, 31115 regular extents (70649 refs), 35977 inline. Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced TOTAL 64% 1.9G 2.9G 6.4G none 100% 1.3G 1.3G 2.6G zstd 35% 596M 1.6G 3.8GOnly 2 gb’s are actually being used, even though some tools might be reporting 6.4 gb.
And this is with these runtimes installed:
Name Application ID Version Branch Installation Freedesktop Platform org.freedesktop.Platform freedesktop-sdk-23.08.34 23.08 system Mesa org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 25.0.7 23.08 system Mesa (Extra) org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 25.0.7 23.08-extra system Mesa org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 26.0.5 25.08 system Mesa (Extra) org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default 26.0.5 25.08-extra system Codecs Extra Extension org.freedesktop.Platform.codecs-extra 25.08-extra system GNOME Application Platform version 49 org.gnome.Platform 49 system Breeze GTK theme org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Breeze 6.6.5 3.22 systemExcept for the fact that the runtime is reused across apps, meaning that another app which uses up that runtime won’t be taking up any extra space.
You can sandbox them with something like firejail or bubblewrap.
Similar, you can sandbox with bubblewrap. But you gotta write nix code to do it because ofc:
https://github.com/fgaz/nix-bubblewrap , https://github.com/nixpak/nixpak , https://sr.ht/~alexdavid/jail.nix/
I’ve tried to use them before though, definitely not as easy as flatpak’s flatseal sandboxing in comparison. Also, nix apps on non nix distros aren’t GPU accelerated.