14 DAY TRIAL // Flatpak, the Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, has been updated recently to version 0.11.4, a maintenance update that introduces numerous important changes.
With Flatpak 0.11.4, the development team updated the "flatpak build" command to allow it to always use multi-arch support, as well as to mount app extensions during the build process. In addition, the "flatpak build-init" command now supports adding of extension points earlier than build-finish by using the --extension argument, and build-finish now supports the --remove-extension argument.
Updates were also made to the "flatpak uninstall" command, which can now pick the user or system automatically if they're not specified, the "flatpak run" command, which received several new options like --no-a11y-bus and --no-documents-portal. Also, users can now use "flatpak remove" (without quotes) as an alias for the "flatpak uninstall" command.
Flatpak portal now lets apps sandbox themselves
Among other interesting changes implemented in the Flatpak 0.11.4 release, we can mention that the new Flatpak Portal now lets apps sandbox themselves, as well as to restart newer version of themselves, there's also support for end-of-life:ing apps, and a brand new AppStream branch format make distribution more efficient. For backwards compatibility, the older AppStream branch is still generated.
There are also various smaller, yet important tweaks that should make your Flatpak experience better and pleasant, such as the fact that the flatpak version is now included in the user agent when downloading apps, updating of multiple apps just become faster as only local repos are now purged, libflatpak learned new ways of listing remotes by type and supports fetching of remote metadata.
To improve the overall maintainability and performance of Flatpak installs and updates, Flatpak 0.11.4 brings internal restructuring of the source code. Last but not least, a new X-Flatpak-RunOptions option was added in the exported desktop files to allow you to specify no-documents-portal and no-a11y-bus. You can download the latest Flatpak release right now from GitHub.