14 DAY TRIAL // Flatpak's Alex Larsson released a new version of the popular Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework that promises to be the future of application distribution across Linux OSes.
Flatpak 1.1.0 is now available as the first snapshot to kick off the development of the Flatpak 1.2 series, which is expected to arrive by the end of the year, promising new features and improvements to make your Flatpak experience better from all angles when you want to deploy apps across multiple Linux-based operating systems.
In this development release, the development team implemented a new "flatpak kill" command to finally let users kill running Flatpak instances, and made the --remote argument optional in the "flatpak install" command for interactive installs, prompting users to choose a remote location to install the app.
Furthermore, Flatpak 1.1.0 adds support for the --columns option to all commands printing tables in an attempt to allow users to specify what exactly to output, support for --commits argument to the "flatpak repo" command to list commits in a branch, along with support for --info argument to show information about a Flatpak repository.
Flatpak can now log transactions to the systemd journal
Other noteworthy changes implemented in the Flatpak 1.1.0 release include the ability of the framework to log transactions to the systemd journal if it's built against the libsystemd library, support for the "flatpak remote-ls" command to show the runtime used for each app, and better error output.
The "flatpak list" command has been updated as well to support filtering by runtime, and the "flatpak uninstall" command now supports --delete-data argument to allow users to delete the application data directory in their Home folder. If no application is specified, the data from all uninstalled apps will be removed.
Flatpak 1.1.0 is the first step towards the Flatpak 1.2 series, which will require OSTree 2018.9 or higher. You don't have to install Flatpak 1.1.0 on your Linux distro to enjoy the new features and improvements, but you can download the source tarball if you want to take it for a test drive. We recommend waiting for Flatpak 1.2 before upgrading from the Flatpak 1.0 series.