A big new release of Flatseal is out! It took a bit longer, due to that little Portfolio detour 😅, but it finally happened. This release introduces some subtle improvements to the UI, along with one major new feature; initial support for Portals.
Starting with the UI improvements, a massive libhandy’fication happened. Main widgets such as the window, groups and permissions rows are now using libhandy widgets. This helped to remove a lot of custom code, but also brought neat little details like rounded corners, the ability to toggle permissions by simply tapping the rows, among other things. Thanks to @BrainBlasted for starting this work.
The applications search entry can now be toggled, and its position is now independent of the scrolled window. Not having to scroll back to the top to change the search terms, makes it a bit more usable.
This release comes with an offline version of Flatseal’s documentation, thanks to a newly-added viewer. For now, the documentation is only available in English. I am hoping to improve the document before any attempt to translate it. Thanks to Apostrophe for such nice exporters 🙂.
Moving on to the new big feature, yes, portals! With this release, it’s now possible to review and manage dynamic permissions. Thank @hferreiro for requesting this feature.
This initial support includes six of the most basic permissions. The plan is to support as many of these, as long as it makes sense of course. Having said that, a few important notes:
- Not all dynamic permissions rely on stored “decisions” and, therefore, there’s nothing for Flatseal to manage.
- Not all Flatpak applications use portals currently and, therefore, many of these new options won’t be very useful until portals get more adoption.
- It is expected to see many of these permissions “grayed out”. Check the tooltips for the specific reason but, it is likely due to the fact that some of these portals have not been used yet and, therefore, have not set up any data for Flatseal to manage.
Well, that’s it for now. Any suggestions, ideas, bugs, I am always available. And if you haven’t tried Flatseal yet, I recommend getting it from Flathub.
Last but never least, thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, @BrainBlasted, @cho2, @Vistaus, @ovari, @eson57, @TheEvilSkeleton, @AsciiWolf and @MiloCasagrande.
