Add official Flatpak support

[deadmeu]

This is a feature request for an official Flatpak release. I really love QDirStat and think it should be more accessible. I know in the past you've shared your disagreements with packaging formats such as Flatpak but I believe a Flatpak release could help for the following reasons:

• Flatpaks can share libraries and dependencies without resulting in a massive download/install size so the impact may not be as large as other packaging formats.
• Flatpaks allow software to be more easily controlled and isolated by the user to better harden their system from potential security exploits. I don't ever use QDirStat to modify my filesystem so I would love to be able to completely restrict it to read-only access to my files (it would also be very easy to, for example, disable network access).
• I daily drive Arch and many other people do too. It's a shame that QDirStat isn't officially available for my distro and that I have to rely on the AUR. Flatpaks are designed to be highly compatible and would allow more people to more easily find and install QDirStat. There are lots of people with products such as the Steam Deck now who rely on Flatpaks to install their software, and there is already online interest in QDirStat and other similar programs that help diagnose storage issues (due to the relatively small storage configurations the Steam Deck ships with).
  • https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ud7e6j/qdirstat_on_deck/
  • https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/yn3el7/is_there_an_app_like_windirstat_for_linux/
  • https://old.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/thida4/whats_taking_up_all_that_space/

I think as far as common packaging formats go Flatpaks are currently the most accepted in the Linux community and there has been more serious adoption recently due to the aforementioned reasons.

In any case, thanks for all of the valuable work you've done for all these years.

[shundhammer]

QDirStat has minimal dependencies to begin with: Just the Qt libs and libZ (the compression lib). That was a conscious decision: To avoid the dependency hell that you can easily get with a KDE program like KDirStat was.

The arguments against FlatPak are very much the same as those against AppImage: The application to combat disk space waste would grow enormously in size; it's hard to say by how much, but a lower bound would be the size of those packages:

• QDirStat itself: 2.1 MB
• libQt5Core5: 6.0 MB
• libQt5Gui5: 12.1 MB

That's at least 20.2 MB already, up from 2.1 MB; a factor 10. And that's the lower boundary. It also disregards indirect dependencies that the Qt libs themselves have (but that's mostly small stuff like libxcb with ~160 k). For a real-world QDirStat FlatPak, I'd expect more like 100+ MB.

And then there is another misconception: That those include-everything package formats are a universal solution to dependency problems. Well, no, they are not.

Apart from distribution-specific quirks, just think about different hardware architectures. x86_64 / amd64 (the PC platform) is only one of them. What about all those RasPIs out there that have become much more popular? They are ARM-based. The older ones are ARM-32, but ARM-64 is already entering the market. Some recent Macs are also ARM-64. And I'd expect NAS platforms also to use mostly ARM-32 or -64.

And I didn't even mention other CPU architectures like PPC64, let alone mainframes like s/390. They can all run Linux, and many of them do.

If anybody wants to bear that burden and package QDirStat as a FlatPak, they have my blessing to do so; I see it as yet another distribution format.

But just like for regular Linux distributions, I am not going to take over the packaging hassle, much less the inevitable newbie support (which more often than not is the result of not bothering to read the documentation).