In my opinion the article was well written and well researched (many sources), and to separate different topics but relatable it used different sections.
> Size
As the author mentions, many users uses budget computers or something like a raspberry pi and not a big gaming rig, but you also have to consider the network usage, all that data needs to be downloaded, that in it self is a cost for the network for every computer running that distro.
I work from my laptop when I'm traveling, I use my phone as wifi hotspot, download gigabytes of data for installing some small app is not feasible.
And you also have to consider poor countries, in poor countries you don't have infinite downloads nor the largest drives.
I remember the old days of the critique against Windows from the Linux community, Windows forces you to constantly upgrade hardware even though that old machine still works fine. I guess this is now true for Linux too.
However; when compared to other operating systems - like Windows - these space requirements are negligible: a full installation of Window 11 takes north of 30GB, so even with five years of accumulated flatpak runtimes, this is still less than a third of a Windows installation.
Even budget computers can satisfy this. And once the runtimes are installed, your mostly good - there are only so many runtimes[0].
With regards to raspberry pi; yes, that's not what Flatpaks are aimed at, at least not now.
> Size
As the author mentions, many users uses budget computers or something like a raspberry pi and not a big gaming rig, but you also have to consider the network usage, all that data needs to be downloaded, that in it self is a cost for the network for every computer running that distro.
I work from my laptop when I'm traveling, I use my phone as wifi hotspot, download gigabytes of data for installing some small app is not feasible.
And you also have to consider poor countries, in poor countries you don't have infinite downloads nor the largest drives.
I remember the old days of the critique against Windows from the Linux community, Windows forces you to constantly upgrade hardware even though that old machine still works fine. I guess this is now true for Linux too.