Flatpak 0.99.1 is the first pre-release before Flatpak 1.0

Jun 21, 2018 18:32 GMT  ·  By

Flatpak, the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework formerly known as XDG-App, is closer than ever to get its first ever stable, production-ready release.

While it's becoming very popular among Linux users as it is more and more adopted by Linux OS vendors, Flatpak is still considered an "under development" technology, and so it's not yet promoted on a mass scale as its rival Snap is by Ubuntu's mother company Canonical.

However, Flatpak as it is right now, it's very usable, but it is yet to achieve the 1.0 version milestone, which usually marks a project as mature and ready for mass deployment. And it's now more closer than ever as the development team announced today the availability of the first Flatpak 1.0 pre-release version.

Developer Alexander Larsson released today Flatpak 0.99.1, the first pre-release version before Flatpak 1.0, which is considered feature-complete, saying that no major new features and changes are expected to arrive in upcoming pre-release builds before Flatpak hits the 1.0 milestone, but only bug fixes and optimizations.

What's coming in Flatpak 1.0

Being a mature release, Flatpak 1.0 promises to make peer-to-peer updates more efficient and the P2P code non-optional to the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework requiring OSTree 2018.6, make installations faster by requiring fewer fsync calls, and implement new SSH agent permissions for Secure Shell access in apps.

Flatpak 1.0 will also come with updated "flatpak install," "flatpak uninstall," and "flatpak update" commands that can now list all the operations they'll do and ask the user for confirmation before starting, a new "::ready" signal for the FlatpakTranscation API to allow users to do related confirmation prompts, and new permissions for updates, which will be displayed for all Flatpak apps.

No release date was announced for Flatpak 1.0, but it shouldn't be long until it hits the streets as the development team is very active lately. Until then, you can try the Flatpak 0.99.1 pre-release version if you want to experiment with the new features and enhancement, but we recommend using the latest stable release in a production environment.