I have been daily driving a dual booted laptop for the past two years. After a year of distro hopping I settled with fedora + kde and never looked back. I really liked the auto nvidia driver config and it made everything so pleasant to work. Since the last 8 or 9 months I decided to do gaming using bottles and proton ge. I cannot afford to buy games and bottles is a God send at that. Now I realized that I had not logged into my windows partition in over 6 months. So I logged in to check and it told me it needs to download 8 gigs of updates. That sent me into rage and so clean installed everything to be fedora. I have 250 gb of storage locked in limbo because of windows( I have a 512 gb ssd so it was a lot) and today after everything was setup, the os took only around 20gb minus the games. Never felt happier.
The Flatpak issue is specifically because of distributions technicalities related to the proprietary driver. On AMD or Intel this isn’t a problem at all, in fact the block based update mechanism is much more efficient than most distro updates. It’s rather annoying, ur I believe it’s being worked on by the Flatpak devs.
Manjaro chooses to keep software back for a while, so multiple weeks of major updates all come at once. Add to that CUDA, the Nvidia Docker container, and LaTeX, and you easily get multiple gigabytes per update. It’s not really a problem in the age of terabyte SSDs and gigabit internet, even if it does feel quite pointless.
I’ve never really had many issues with Electron on Arch based distros. Arch packages most Electron applications as the required bits for a single Electron package that gets updated individually. On all other distros, Electron does waste a lot of space, though.