Bug 505350

I post this here as discuss.kde.org is rarely visited by the correct people it seems.

There are 3 big runtimes. FDO (the main one) and GNOME and KDE, which have additions on top of FDO. While Flatpak uses OSTree and deduplication, I am not sure if it isnt an issue that there are these 3 runtimes.

Apps are permanently using different runtime versions, meaning users may have 3-9 runtimes installed!

Why is this? Why aren't the GNOME and KDE runtimes just runtime extensions on top of the FDO runtime? That seems to be an easy fix for a big problem, also bandwidth and server cost wise. The current system does not seem efficient (but if this is 100% the same, please correct me).

If this is correct, I propose to convert the KDE runtime to a FDO runtime extension and transfer all apps that use it to that combo. This is a huge change, but it will only get harder with time.

Same goes for GNOME, and also for fundamental packages shipped in many Flatpaks like libvlc, ffmpeg, mpv, poppler etc. which exist as binaries "dumped" into some KDE Flatpaks (like Haruna or Okular). If those were runtime extensions, apps could declare them, updates and vulnerabilities would be transparent, and resources would be shared.

Cheers!