Flatpak 0.10.2 is coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you

Dec 18, 2017 21:59 GMT  ·  By

Alex Larsson released at the end of last week a new stable update of the Flatpak 0.10 Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XDG-App) for GNU/Linux distributions.

Bringing a month's worth of improvements, Flatpak 0.10.2 is out with support for OSTree 2017.14, which is required for building the new release. An interesting feature of Flatpak 0.10.2 is the ability of the "flatpak update" command to update apps from both system and user installations by default.

In addition, all Flatpak remote-* commands now automatically decide by default if they need to use either the --system or --user arguments, based on the given remote name. The "flatpak remote-ls" command has been updated as well to list the content of all remotes when no remote is given.

Flatpak 0.10.2 also makes the "flatpak update" to be less noisy when updating appstream information, and updates the "flatpak install" command to support the --reinstall argument for uninstalling previously installed versions of apps and letting users pass absolute pathnames for remote names.

"flatpak install now allows you to pass an absolute pathname as remote name, which will create a temporary remote and install from that. The remote will be removed when the app is uninstalled. This is very useful during development and testing," reads the GitHub release notes.

flatpak override gets some new features too

The "flatpak override" command received some improvements as well in the Flatpak 0.10.2 release, being able to override globally with no argument and to support the --nofilesystem properly, which can be used for hiding certain directories, even those with Home access, for all Flatpak apps (e.g. flatpak override --nofilesystem=~/.ssh).

Lastly, Flatpak 0.10.2 addresses a regression that breaks xdg-user-dirs and theme selection for KDE apps, and Flatpak is now capable of creating CLI (command-line interface) wrappers for all installed apps, allowing users to start Flatpak apps by their application ID when adding /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin or ~/.local/share/flatpak/exports/bin to their PATH.

Flatpak 0.10.2 is available for download right now from its GitHub releases page as a source tarball if you fancy compiling it yourself on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, and it should soon make its way into the stable software repositories of various Linux-based operating system, so make sure you update to this version at your earliest convenience.

Flatpak 0.10.2 Changelog