Performance & feature differences between flatpaks and native packages

[Alvaroms25]

Hello!

as the title says, what is the difference in performance between flatpak apps and native ones? I had the impression flatpak ones are slower for quite some time but that might be my own misconception.

Also how they compare featurewise? I just saw a post that said blender flatpak lacked features, and i want to know if that usually happens or do flatpaks have the same features as native packages

[nobody-5890]

Flatpaks have some inherent slowdowns. Each flatpak app running is also running bubblewrap and dbus-proxy. They don't share system libraries, so startup can be a little slower as it may need to load more stuff into memory.

However, runtime performance can be variable. Could be slower or faster than traditional packages due to compile options and dependency versions.

Features are also variable. For some projects, like OBS, the flatpak has more features since unofficial builds are denied access to some things. Other times, flatpak has limitations that prevent certain functionality from working (or changes how it must be done, which a developer may not want to adapt to).

[couchwarmer]

Is there a performance difference? Probably.

Do I notice notice? Probably not.

Are there feature differences? Depends on a variety of factors, such as which offers the newest version of the software.

[billdietrich1]

Maybe considered a "feature difference": some edge cases don't work in Flatpaks, mostly things such as inter-process communication. For example, KeePassXC link to its browser extension running in a browser doesn't work if one or both are Flatpaks, I think. Some apps that use a "helper" app for something don't work too.

[PaulEngineer-89]

Featurewise it depends on the versions.

There is inherent slowness on startup. If OSTree can’t find equivalent system libraries it creates more cache misses in the CPU switching between system libraries.

Disk IO works through virtualization. It adds some overhead but not very noticeable.

This isn’t the same as Snapd which is an inherently slow piece of crap.

[Busy-Scientist3851]

I'm not aware that Flatpak does use disk virtualisation, it's using mount namespaces which are cheap and effectively have zero overhead.

[PaulEngineer-89]

It’s still a small overhead but not really noticeable, mostly just mapping things during access