14 DAY TRIAL // The Flatpak developers, through Alex Larsson, announced on the last day of July 2016 that a new update of the Flatpak universal binary application format, version 0.6.8, was available.
According to the release notes, Flatpak 0.6.8 is here to introduce a bunch of goodies either for those who want to distribute their open source projects as universal binaries for GNU/Linux operating systems that support the Flatpak standalone format, or users who need an easy method of installing the latest software releases on their distributions.
New features include the implementation of the "--no-desktop" command-line argument that promises to let users run Flatpack applications outside the graphical desktop environment of their GNU/Linux operating system. Of course, some of the functionality will be lost when running Flatpak apps this way.
OSTree 2016.7 or later is now required for running Flatpak apps
The Flatpak 0.6.8 release also bumps the OSTree dependency to version 2016.7 or later, thus allowing the development team to re-enable the use of static delta for system downloads when running Flatpak apps, addresses some memory leaks, and introduces initial support for RPMs packages as flatpak-builder archive sources.
There's also support for setting the correct XDG_DATA_DIRS path thanks to the implementation of a systemd config snippet, the "--arch" command-line argument is now supported in the Flatpak list, the access() function is supported in the document portal, and CLI (Command-line interface) translation begins.
It also looks like exported desktop files are now being validated, and the documentation has been improved. Flatpak 0.6.8 is now available for supported GNU/Linux operating systems, so it is recommended that you update as soon as possible to get all of the goodies mentioned above. You can also download the Flatpak 0.6.8 sources right now.