Flatpaks disk size usage & Aurora question

General
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Hi, Universal Blue community :wave:

I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations on the efforts being undertaken here. I am genuinely enthusiastic about this project, as I also believe it represents the future of Linux.

I recently bought a DELL Inspiron 15 3520, featuring an Intel Core i3-1215U, for my parents, who are both elderly and rather conservative regarding technology. After installing Bluefin on the laptop, I have been thoroughly impressed with its performance. It runs smoothly and efficiently, even with the Flatpaks (that are not very attractive on normal distros). Furthermore, I have observed that it offers automatic updates for all software, including firmware, as mentioned in a post by Jorge. Processor stays around 5% in idle without spikes.This is indeed remarkable. They are also very satisfied with their new operating system. Great stuff.

However, I was able to see that the disk size continues to grow for some reason, and so far I am connecting it to Mozilla Firefox flatpak usage - I am attaching pictures here Picture1 Picture2
Is it normal to be like this? How much is it going to grow? It used to be less than 1 GB.

Secondly, I would like to address my concerns regarding the Aurora branch. I have been testing it across multiple platforms, including an older Asus laptop x541U with an Intel i5-6198DU processor, as well as my newer desktop featuring an Intel i5 Coffee Lake 9400F and a Gigabyte B365M motherboard. The performance does not match that of Bluefin. It is characterized by a slow and sluggish response, with flatpaks taking an excessively long time to launch. In fact, it is slower than Ubuntu. I have also run tests in VirtualBox, and the performance results were similar.

While some individuals find Gnome to be preferable, others for its ease of use among older users, I personally align myself with KDE Plasma. I would be eager to migrate from MX Linux to Aurora, but at this time, I find myself unable to make that change.
MX Linux operates exceptionally well on my computer, with no problems encountered. It is not surprising that it holds the top position on Distrowatch. However, I find the necessity of reinstalling the system every two years to be quite tiresome, along with the presence of multiple package managers and a user interface that lacks visual appeal.

Has Aurora encountered setbacks in its progress, or is it pursuing an alternative development process as it moves forward on a path toward Bluefin?

1 Like
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If you keep digging into that directory it’s the cache, config, and data for Firefox, so that depends on your browsing habits, mine is 9GB.

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Firefox caches the web sites you visit, so next time visit will be faster. Usually pictures are caches, because they do not change during clicking on web page. For example on this forum there is blue icon on top left and you can click multiple times on forum and there is no need Firefox downloads the same image multiple times. It reduces the burden on web server and also it is far faster to display web page loading file from local disk comparing to downloading it from web site.

Also, this has nothing to do with flatpak vs. native package. Flatpak is just packaged in its own sandbox comparing to deb or rpm that has full control of computer.

Can can safely clean the file cache in Firefox: top right hamburger menu | Setting | Privacy and Security | History | Clean History button and delete what you want. You can also set “Firefox will” and set “Never remember history”.

This is possible to set, but if you have some spare disk, I would not recommend to do that, because cleaning cache will have consequences. Like slower display of web pages that were already visited. Deleting cookies will require to login into some web sites if user checked to remember password for example etc.

Maybe first time you can clear the cache to make sure this is what is consuming disk. But I suggest, specially with elderly parents if everything is working. If they are used to automatically get into gmail for example without providing password, then they will tell you that there computer is broken.

I don’t know the answer, but on my 2 years old laptop I am using Windows as host and Ubuntu 24.04 and Blufin 40 as VirtualBox virtual machines and I notice doing day to day tasks that Ubuntu is faster then Blufin. Not for large margin, just here and there is some lag on my computer. Nothing scientific measurement, just feeling. It may also be some specific to my computer. What ever, I just decided I will swallow the small lags here and there and experience new way of computing.

I don’t know how much is the lag in you case. Can you provide some details, like is if half a second, second, few seconds, few minutes… and do you experience lag at some specific task, which one.

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Alright, good to know :+1:

Now, this is not the same as with our case here. Ubuntu and Bluefin are very different.

But Bluefin and Aurora are almost the same thing, based on Fedora and I understand that repos are also the same, the only difference would be the desktop environment.

I was not able to take it on bare metal again, but I gave it a couple of spins in virtualbox on my desktop computer with same settings, 4 processors and 8 GB RAM, right after logging in:

Aurora got a 46 seconds boot time from image selection to login screen; a 14 seconds time to open Firefox on Wayland and 3 seconds on X11.

Bluefin took 41 seconds boot time from image selection to login screen, a 4 seconds time to open Firefox on Wayland and also 4 on X11.

I’ve seen that some flatpks breaking on Plasma with Wayland. Tested Zotero integration with Libre Office and Zotero would crash and close after trying to insert a reference from Libre. There was not a problem on X11, although I did not test it thoroughly.

Now, one might say this is a display server issue, however, on bare metal when I tested both of them, Aurora would take like double the time to load from image selection to login screen (not just on one piece of hardware). Boot time has nothing to do with display servers.