Flatpak list shows nvidia driver packages installed... can i remove them?

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1

i have the backend for flatpak installed for discover so whenever there is a flatpack update they automatically show up in discover.

as a result, i’m still getting the nvidia driver flatpak updates even tho i’ve changed my GPU to AMD.

when use the flatpack list command these packages are included in the output

nvidia-525-105-17                            org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-525-105-17                                  1.4                system
nvidia-530-41-03                             org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-530-41-03                                   1.4                system
nvidia-535-104-05                            org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-104-05                                  1.4                system
nvidia-535-113-01                            org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-113-01                                  1.4                system
nvidia-535-129-03                            org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-129-03                                  1.4                system
nvidia-535-54-03                             org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-54-03                                   1.4                system
nvidia-535-86-05                             org.freedesktop.Platform.GL32.nvidia-535-86-05                                   1.4                system

i can’t remember if i installed these or the system did and flatpak history only goes back to last Nov

do i need to keep these?

can i use flatpak uninsall on these?

2

I have them as well. They were pulled in by nvidia-compute-G06, or whatever version you used. I think they are safe to remove if you have already removed the nVidia driver package.

3

i’ve already run

sudo apt purge *nvidia*
sudo apt autoremove

and this house is clean

Screenshot_20240125_063042
Screenshot_20240125_063042705×439 24.1 KB

so unless anyone knows of a reason to keep these, i’m going to clear them out so don’t have to keep seeing the updates.

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4

With nothing in the system to use them they are not required. They will never be loaded again until a PCID for a video card contained in them is found by the system.

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5

They can be removed. I purged all the flatpack drivers and then flatpack itself even though I still use nvidia. Much like Snap, the bloat was profound and the performance and stability questionable, so now I have neither of them on my system at all.

6

Indeed first thing I do is remove that snap junk, never have tried the flatpak.

7

That should have freed up a nice chunk of space.

8

I use almost all my apps as flatpaks and see almost no increase in overall disk usage.
Flatpak being inefficient with space is a myth. A lot of people believe in it because they see their only installed flatpak app taking over a gigabyte, thinking this overhead will be the same for all apps. But it won’t because you already have the platform runtime.

9

I run the flatpak version of LibreOffice, just so that all those old python libraries are handled in the flatpak rather than having to keep up with all of the different versions in my packages.

I use the flatpak version of Discord, because it runs better for some reason. So, yes I like flatpaks, but these nVidia flatpaks are installed even if you have no other flatpaks installed on your system. So, part of the drivers is from the repo and part from flatpak. I don’t know why they chose to do it this way, but they did. I guess it is so that one driver might work on many more distributions.

These nVidia flatpaks are hundreds of megs each, and I know this because I have to download the updates on a regular basis. Uninstalling them will free up space and stop the constant downloads of these updates.

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