Flatpak is constantly evolving, features are being added and more programs are being offered in this packaging format. If you’re wondering, «What the hell is this Flatpak?» We wrote a post explaining a little more about this technology.
Last year the Flatpak arrived at your version 1.0, with new parameters and performance improvements, from then on the polishing process did not stop. Advancing a little in time, we arrived at the beginning of the year, and in February the version 1.2, in addition to adding new parameters, Flatpak’s visual via terminal was redesigned. Thus having a better disposition in the information via CLI.
Development is so accelerated that numerous versions have already been released this year. Now the latest release is announced with a feature awaited by many.
Learn more about Flatpak
We know that everything has its pros and cons, after all, we humans develop the current technology. If you are in doubt between the formats, access our post detailing a little more the differences between the “new competitors” of software distribution on Linux.
Many do not understand the advantages of Flatpak, or other formats. Others come to believe and generalize that its use is impracticable, or even impossible.
Comparisons with the form of distribution and functioning between Windows and Linux are also the subject of heated debates and discussions. However, some speak without really knowing these differences, just repeat it like parrots. In order not to take this risk, access an article demonstrating the types of packages and installations, both on Windows and Linux. I even indicate that you see the video contained in the post above, it contains a lot of additional information.
Flatpak 1.5
One of the advantages of Flatpak, is to use programs in updated versions without the worry of dependency conflicts. Having the latest versions of applications, without compromising the system is a very interesting feature. However, think of a hypothesis in which the user, for some reason, wants to “freeze” / fix the app in a certain version and avoid automatic downloads. The feature that was being awaited by several users of Flatpak, becomes reality with the new version.
The changes in version 1.5 are:
- New options in the “flatpak install”, For example, the parameter“–Or-update”;
- A new command, the “flatpak mask”, Allowing to fix the version of the flatpaks avoiding downloads automatic;
- Support for automatic updates and their monitoring on the flatpak portal;
- Corrections in updates of services exported with dbus-broken;
- Visual improvement when using via CLI, hiding columns at the terminal output if all are equal;
- Corrections of eventual errors in which the remote repositories were not removed properly;
- THE flatpak-session-helper becomes linked to more libraries;
- OCI: now supports tagged images (“tagged”) with labels and annotations;
- OCI: starts to always generate histories for images;
- OCI: supports mimetypos docker in addition to OCI mimetypos.
- The uninstallation now always works, even if the remote repository has been removed abruptly (forced);
- New configuration keys for the default languages ​​now allow adding to the system list, instead of a replacement;
- Several minor adjustments to the behavior and output of the CLI were made.
You can add Flatpak to your system, following our tutorial. However, the versions contained in the distribution repositories will not always be the most current. Ubuntu is a beautiful example. To obtain the latest versions on the Canonical system, it will be necessary to add the official Flatpak PPA.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak
sudo apt update
sudo apt install flatpak
Obviously it is not mandatory to use this format via terminal, thinking about it, we created this article teaching how to enable support for Flatpaks in the Ubuntu store.
I do not normally indicate the use of PPAs, each case a case, however many bug fixes are only present in the most current ones. I can report an annoying case that occurred to me. The version of Flatpak contained in the Ubuntu repositories, simply went on to download numerous runtimes my NVIDIA video driver, regardless of the version used. And with each new version, more and more new runtimes were downloaded (were not in use). Even removing them, they were downloaded again. Right after installing the PPA version, I was able to solve this bug (this case happened a while ago).
In our forum Diolinux Plus, I also noticed reports from users who got an error while installing apps in Flatpak, due to the old version in the Ubuntu repositories and other distros, like Debian. So, if for some reason everything works correctly for you, there may not be a need to update to the latest versions via PPA. Analyze and make your own decisions, at your own risk.
NOTE: So far Flatpak via PPA has not yet received version 1.5, you can check directly by this link and confirm that it has been updated.
For any doubts, use the command: “flatpak –help”To view each function. Don’t know the version of Flatpak on your system? “flatpak –version”Shows you the versioning.
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Source: Flatpak.
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