Despite having been a contributor to the GNOME project for almost 5 years now (first at Red Hat and now at Endless), I’ve never found the time to blog about my work. Fortunately in many cases collaborators have made posts or the work was otherwise announced. Now that Endless is a non-profit foundation and we are working hard at advocating for our solutions to technology access barriers in upstream projects, I think it’s an especially good time to make my first blog post announcing a recent feature in Flatpak, which I worked on with a lot of help from Alex Larsson.
On many low-end computers, persistent storage space is quite limited. Some Endless hardware for example has only 32 GB. And we want to fill much of it with useful content in the form of Flatpak apps so that the computers are useful even offline. So often in the past we have shipped computers that are already quite full before the user stores any files. Ideally we want that limited space to be used as efficiently as possible, and Flatpak and OSTree already have some neat mechanisms to that end, such as de-duplicating any identical files across all apps and their runtimes (and, in the case of Endless OS, including the OS files as well).
(For the uninitiated a runtime is basically a set of libraries that can be shared between Flatpak apps, and which the apps use at run-time.)
However, there’s room for improvement. In Flatpak versions prior to 1.9.1 (1.9.x is currently the unstable series), runtimes are, broadly speaking, not uninstalled when the last app using them is uninstalled or updated to use a newer runtime. In some special cases such as locale extensions runtimes are uninstalled, but the main runtimes such as the GNOME or KDE ones that take up the most space are left behind unless manually uninstalled. And those runtimes can take up a significant amount of disk space:
$ du -sh ~/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.38 890M /home/mwleeds/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.38 $ du -sh ~/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/5.14 969M /home/mwleeds/.local/share/flatpak/runtime/org.kde.Platform/x86_64/5.14
This does have a significant advantage: in case the runtime is needed again in the future it will not have to be re-downloaded. But ultimately it is not a good situation to have the user’s disk space increasingly taken up by unneeded Flatpak runtimes as their apps migrate to newer runtimes, with no way for non-technical users to remedy the situation.
For a while now Flatpak has had the ability to remove unused runtimes with the command flatpak uninstall –unused. But users should never need to use the command line to keep their computer running well. And users who choose to use the command line already run flatpak update regularly, so in the new implementation removing unused runtimes is integrated into the update command (in addition to happening behind-the-scenes in GNOME Software for GUI-only users).
A compromise was chosen between removing all unused runtimes and always leaving them installed, which is to remove unused runtimes which have been marked End Of Life on the server side, on the basis that such runtimes are unlikely to be needed again in the future. Of course for this to work properly, runtime publishers must properly set the EOL metadata when appropriate, as was recently fixed on Flathub. So please do so if you maintain any runtimes!
I’ve glossed over it so far but actually defining when a runtime is unused is not trivial: a runtime in the system installation may be used by an app in the current user’s per-user installation (which Flatpak can detect), a runtime in the system installation may be used by an app in another user’s per-user installation (which Flatpak cannot detect), and a runtime may be used for development purposes. For this latter case the current implementation offers two solutions: one can prevent a runtime from being automatically uninstalled by pinning it with the flatpak pin command. Additionally, runtimes that are manually installed (as opposed to being pulled in to satisfy a dependency requirement) are automatically pinned.
You can check if you have any pinned runtime patterns (the command accepts globs in addition to precise runtimes) by just executing flatpak pin without any arguments.
Long story short, with the upcoming releases of Flatpak 1.10 and GNOME Software 40, both will remove unused EOL runtimes during update operations and uninstall operations, freeing up disk space for users. If you maintain a software manager that supports Flatpak, you may consider using the new API to ensure unused runtimes are regularly cleaned up.
There is one improvement I’d like to make for this feature: we could take filesystem access time information into account when determining if a runtime is unused (perhaps removing a runtime that hasn’t been executed in a year?). But that is for another day…