There are many reasons to dislike Nvidia on Linux. Here is a little thing that bugs me all the time, the updates. Normally the system updates would be quick and fast, but with the proprietary drivers of Nvidia involved, it gets quiet slow process. And I am not even talking about any other problem I encounter, just about the updates.
As an Archlinux based system user (EndeavourOS to be precise), I get new Kernel updates all the time. That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part. But that’s not too bad, even though it’s doing this twice for each Kernel I have once.
What’s more infuriating is, if you also happen to use Flatpaks for a very few applications. I really don’t have many Flatpaks at all. Yet, the Nvidia drivers are installed in 7 versions or what?! And they are full downloads, each 340 MB or more. This takes ages and is the only part that takes long to update Flatpak system. I always do flatpak remove --unused to make sure nothing useless is present. /RANT (EDIT: Just typos corrected.)
I doubt they’re all full downloads. Flatpak does a lot of deduplication. Flatpak will pretend to download 340MB for me, but the progress bar will freeze after 15MB and then continue onto the next item. You can see it in your screenshot as well, >140MB downloads that are marked as completed even though only a few megabytes were actually fetched. It still takes ages for it to extract on my machine (pretty sure it’s because btrfs is also deduplicating the files Flatpak is already deduplicating) but the sheer download size isn’t the problem in my experience. Not great, but not as terrible as it may seem.
Try this script, you may be surprised how much Flatpak object space is actually deduplicated.
The real issue in this case is the lack of updates from the applications you use. Seemingly abandoned Flatpaks depending on runtimes that went EOL months ago make the whole system very annoying to manage and it slows down the updater as well.
In your case I’d look into what applications are pulling in all of these Nvidia drivers and why, because it looks like they shouldn’t be.
@skullgiver
It downloads every single of them fully. Took 15 minute or so for all the packages or longer. This is going on since I started with Flatpak. The Nvidia drivers are not de-duplicated or partial downloads on my system.
That’s not the one I am complaining. The drivers are the ones named as
org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-xxx-xx-xx. These are the different driver versions of Nvidia and each of the 7 versions are 340 MB or more and are always downloaded fully. You can see each of them like 340,9 / 341,8 MB. What you was referring to is not what I am complaining. The extraction of the archives and installation is quick. Every other package is quick, only those take this long.It isn’t a hard problem, but very annoying. Not sure how fast internet access you have, I have under 7 MB/s. And only counting the Nvidida drivers through Flatpak alone is 2.3 GBytes. Imagine adding all the other updates in Flatpak, plus the system update of my OS itself and the DKMS. It adds up a lot.
I suffered from this a few months ago as well. The space and bandwidth flatpak was taking for about 2 small cli applications was obscene. Like 30gb all because it had accumulated about 10 nvidia drivers. I found the issue on github and it was closed as intended behavior. I install alot of rust apps from source and updating them from source was faster and easier than updating flatpak just due to the overhead of maintain those drivers.
That and the fact that every app has to be run through an alias or a. overly verbose command made me discount flatpak as a serious project. You can’t ignore UX to that extent and just rely on technical merits.