[microtonal]

It’s fine. I don’t know about Snap, but Flatpack uses shared runtimes. Sure, there is also vendoring, but sharing takes a lot of dependencies out already.

This model has been used on phones and Macs for ages, and for most people it’s not an issue. Photos, videos, and game assets are taking up all the space.

[michaelt]

Snap retains multiple versions of each package, following a setting called "refresh.retain" which defaults to 3.

Install Blender? That's 3x 323MB. Chromium? 3x 158MB Firefox? 3x 242MB

And don't think you're going to get away with just 3 copies of a snap like 'core' or 'gnome' - you're getting three copies of core18 and three copies of core20 and three copies of core22 and three copies of gnome-3-28-1804 and three copies of gnome-3-38-2004 and three copies of gnome-42-2204. At 497MB each.

You might think you could avoid that by reducing the setting to 1, but you're not thinking like the creators of snap - they've decided the minimum value of refresh.retain is 2.