Disclaimer
Flatpak uses OSTree, like Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite etc) and similar to BTRFS snapshots.
So many files are deduplicated and linked, not actually there
https://gitlab.com/TheEvilSkeleton/flatpak-dedup-checker
50GB without
31GB with deduplication
21,4GB with BTRFS compression
What distros are you talking about? Even if install all available DEs, any distro will take ~10 GiB or a bit more. Default installation is much smaller.
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There’s no any magic that could reduce Silverblue size, it is based on the same packages as Workstation. Only the installed subset of packages can differ.
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Yes, it’s kinda magic if you are unable to remove them in non-atomic distro.
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I remember when I used to keep my fully configured distros below 700MB so I could just dump it all to a CD as a backup. Good days.