14 DAY TRIAL // Alex Larsson from the Flatpak project, an open-source initiative to offer a universal binary format for all GNU/Linux distributions, announced the availability of Flatpak 0.8.4.
Coming about three weeks after the release of Flatpak 0.8.4, this update includes fixes for various crashes reported by users since Flatpak 0.8.3 or a previous version, as well as documentation improvements. It also addresses the xauth propagation, which some users reported broken.
The progress reporting in the libflatpak library was fixed as well to go from 0 to 100% at once while merging various phases. The profile script is another component that's been updated in the Flatpak 0.8.4 release to include instructions not to override the XDG_DATA_DIRS environment variable.
Other than that, it looks like origin remotes will no longer be removed during uninstallation of a Flatpak if another application needs them for installation, the locales install won't be reset when updating the locale extensions, and the documentation portal's splice has been disabled.
OpenGL support gets another feature
Besides all the bug fixes mentioned above, the Flatpak 0.8.4 point release also managed to backport another feature that will make the OpenGL support work better than on previous releases. This will allow specifying of the fact that there's no need for a runtime to run the apply script of an OpenGL driver installer, such as the Nvidia one.
"We use this in the Nvidia driver by making the script a static binary, which lets us use the Nvidia driver for multiple runtimes without requiring that a particular one is installed," explains Alex Larsson. "We also support an extension point supporting multiple versions, which will be used for sharing the Nvidia driver between different runtime versions."
That being said, OS integrators who ship Flatpak support on their GNU/Linux distributions can now download the Flatpak 0.8.4 source tarball right now from the GitHub page of the project. Users need to wait for this update to land in the stable repositories of their favorite distro to install it and enjoy the new improvements.