A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8

Earlier this week I released Flatpak 0.8.0. The version change is meant to signal the start of a new long-term supported branch. The 0.8.x series will be strictly bugfixes, and all new
features will happen in 0.9.x.

The release has a few changes, such as a streamlined command line interface and OCI support, but it also has several additions that make Flatpak more future-proof. For instance, we added versioning to all file formats, and a minimal-flatpak-version-required field for applications.

My goal is to get the 0.8 series into the Debian 9 release, and as many other distributions as possible, so that people who create flatpaks can consider the features it supports as a reliable baseline.

Sandboxing has always been one of the pillars of Flatpak, but even more important to me is cross-distro application distribution, even if not sandboxed. This is important because it gives upstream developers a way to directly interact with their users, without having an intermediate distributor. With 0.8 I think we have reached a level where the support for this is solid. So, if you ever thought about experimenting with Flatpak, now is the time!

I leave you with a small screencast showing the new streamlined way to install an application om the command line (on an otherwise empty system):

For information on how to get flatpak, see flatpak.org. Version 0.8.0 is already in the Ubuntu PPA and in  Fedora. Other distributions hopefully will get it soon.

13 thoughts on “A stable base for Flatpak: 0.8”

  1. Concurrent download/installation a’la docker would be a nice future feature, and let’s encrypt sdk.gnome.org.

  2. So you need to know an address and use sudo?
    The first one isn’t user friendly, you need to create repository with those links so that user would just type program name and don’t think of anything else. And make some switch for optional manual address handling.
    The second one defeats the purpose of going away from rpm/deb. Wasn’t the whole fuzz about flatpack/snap that you could install things without admin rights as a user?

  3. Will there be a way to download an icon, and double click on it to automatically install the app?

    I understand that there is gnome software, but it is not available everywhere.. thanks 🙂

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