Flatpak 1.0 is here with a set of new features

Some days ago, The staff behind the development of Flatpak's technology has announced that stable version 1.0 has already been released., which comes with some bug fixes and especially new features added.

Also as the main characteristic that unveiled in this stable version of Flatpak is the 'significant improvement in performance and reliability' which is an important advance in Flatpak 1.0.

For those new users and people who don't know Flatpak I can tell you that this was previously known as xdg-app.

Flatpak is a utility for software deployment, package management, and application virtualization for Linux desktop environments.

Utility provides a sandbox environment called Bubblewrap, in which users can run applications isolated from the rest of the system.

Applications using Flatpak need user permission to control hardware devices or access user files.

The sandbox is responsible for all communication between the operating system and the hardware. Each application will have its own sandbox - this greatly increases the security of the operating system and the host machine.

One of the main advantages of Flatpak is that it allows the application to run on any (virtually) GNU / Linux distribution.

What's new in Flatpak 1.0

Flatpack 1.0 Compared to the old stable one (0.10.x) it has a faster installation (and update) time, allows you to mark applications that are EOL (end of life), and requires users to confirm application permissions after installation.

Alexander Larsson, has said:

“A lot of work has gone into Flatpak 1.0 and we are confident that it is ready for wider use. Flatpak's goal has always been to revolutionize the Linux ecosystem and this is an important step in that direction. "

In addition to this we can also highlight that, starting with this version, when an application update requires additional permissions that were originally given, now it is necessary for the user to give one more confirmation otherwise the update will not be completed.

Another important change is the addition of a new portal that allows companies to reboot into their own applications, it is useful to automatically restart an application after the update, to run the new version and avoid encountering problems.

The ability to flag applications found in EOL is useful for center software (such as the GNOME Software Center), which can easily alert users to install an application that they are no longer supported.

De the other changes that can be highlighted in this new stable version of Flatpak 1.0 we can find the following:

• Peer-to-peer installation (via USB) is now supported by default
• Applications can request access to the host SSH agent to access remote servers, Git, etc.
• The application can request permission for access devices connected via Bluetooth.
• Some new options for info were presented such as: --show-permissions , --file-access, --show-location, --show-runtime, --show-sdk.
• The repair command repairs damaged packages during installations.
• Applications can export D-Bus services for all D-Bus names they own
• Support for OCI packages has been updated to the latest version
• A new permission to grant X11 access if the user is running in an X11 session.

How to install Flatpak 1.0 on the different Linux distributions?

If you already have Flatpak support added to your system just launch a package update command on your system.

On the other hand, if you have not yet added this technology to your system, they only have to visit the following article where we share instructions to add Flatpak to most Linux distributions.