Flatpak 1.2 Linux App Sandboxing Framework Released with Various Improvements Updated

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Flatpak 1.2 Linux App Sandboxing Framework Released with Various Improvements Updated 

The Flatpak (formerly XDG-App) Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework reached a new milestone today as the project announced the general availability of Flatpak 1.2.

Flatpak is one of the most used Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework among GNU/Linux distributions, allowing developers and users alike to easily and quickly install the latest versions of applications as soon as they are available upstream.

When Flatpak reached maturity with the 1.0 version announced last year in August, it promised to take the lead and beat Canonical's Snap universal binary format used by the Ubuntu Linux operating systems with innovative features. Now, six months later, Flatpak 1.2 is here with more improvements.Here's what's new in Flatpak 1.2Since Flatpak 1.0, the tool received an improved command-line user experience with better progress reporting to search and completion. It also got two new commands, flatpak kill and flatpak ps, so you can better interact with Flatpak apps like you do with native ones, and much-improve logging via new "flatpak history" command or journalctl.

Flatpak 1.2 improves the portals as well by adding a new location portal and a new portal for toolkit settings that respects the desktop lockdown settings, and improves the input validation for all portals. This release also enables support for viewing Flatpak permissions in the GNOME Software and GNOME Settings apps.

With the Flatpak 1.2 release, the development team sponsored by Red Hat, made the universal binary format more robust, stable, and secure. It removes root's ability to modify non-root, per-user Flatpak installations for better security, as well as support for handling dates and timestamps in application data.

Flatpak 1.2 also improves support for Flatpak repositories (flatpakrepo) by ensuring DeployCollectionID works in all cases, improves the uninstall process for empty installations, adds a helper that can validate icon files during export of Flatpaks, and adds the ability to specificy ellipsization in the "--columns" options.

Other noteworthy changes implemented in the Flatpak 1.2 release include support for setting multiple name segments after prefix during export of files, support for raw terminal mode during transactions, and support for the "--extra-collection-id" option in build-commit-from to bind the commit to multiple collection ids.

Flatpak is also now capable of generating a "fontconfig" directory remapping snippet, which is required by newer versions of the Fontconfig utility. Various bugs were also resolved in the Flatpak 1.2 release, whose sources are now available for download from GitHub, but it's also coming soon to the stable repositories of your favorite distro.

Update: This story has been updated with detailed information about the changes implemnted in Flatpak since the Flatpak 1.0 release, as documented by Matthias Clasen here.

 

 

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