Flatpak 1.18, a new stable branch of the Flatpak toolkit, has been published after a year and a half of development. Flatpak provides a system for building self-contained packages that can run on various Linux distributions in a container that isolates the application from the rest of the system. Support for running Flatpak packages is available on Fedora, CentOS, Debian, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Linux Mint, Alt Linux, and Ubuntu. Flatpak packages are included in the Fedora repository and are supported in the standard GNOME and KDE application management programs.
Some key innovations in the Flatpak 1.18 branch include:
- Support for the NTSYNC kernel module, which improves the performance of Windows games launched using Wine by implementing synchronization primitives used in the Windows NT kernel.
- Implementation of conditional permissions to check for specific capabilities in the system or at runtime, allowing for more granular access control.
- Support for VA-API on Intel Xe GPUs for hardware acceleration of video decoding.
- Ability to access the /dev/kfd device using permissions provided for DRI devices to enable direct calculation on AMD GPUs for applications using AMD ROCm, HIP, and OpenCL.
- Added support for redirecting directory access to isolated applications, pre-installed Flatpak applications, and direct installation of applications from container images in OCI format.
- Added options for the “flatpak install” and “flatpak run” commands to enhance flexibility in managing application environments.
- Strengthened isolation of the build environment and introduced new commands for managing dependencies and D-Bus settings.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.