The latest distro I’ve been using for a few months now is Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. Many debs, a few snaps, and quite a few flatpaks installed. When I update the flatpaks it shows a nice display with progress of the flatpaks to be updated, how large they are, and the progress of downloading each one.
It looks like each one doesn’t completely download. At least the numbers for downloaded versus total don’t seem to match. Below is an example but there are times when the download number is just a fraction of the total size to the right. Maybe flatpaks are similar to containers that have layers and don’t necessarily download the whole thing?
Maybe asking the forum at Pop os, someone there would have a better idea if indeed it is a problem or just the way it works and then it’d be no problem or one major pop.
I did get a response to my post on the Flatpak Discourse. They said it was a know issue and gave a link to the Flatpak github.
After reading that it does look like the amount downloaded is a delta from the last download and not the full amount. They are having issues getting a good estimate of the amount that will download.
But Snaps are clever; transactional and delta updates allows devs to only upgrade the parts that need updating, be it a single lib, an app icon, or the entire freaking thing.
The appimages do the same.
AppImageUpdate implements a very efficient algorithm called ZSync2, and thus just downloads the few megabytes that really changed between your local AppImage and the new release.
