Flatpak, the popular Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework, has been updated today to version 1.18, a major release that comes with new features and improvements.

Coming one year and five months after Flatpak 1.16, the Flatpak 1.18 release introduces support for the AMD vendor-specific compute interface (/dev/kfd) via the DRI device permission, support for flatpak+https:// URIs in flatpak install --from, and direct installation from an OCI image.

Flatpak 1.18 also introduces a new function to report the age of the configuration, adds new has-usb-device and has-usb-portal permission conditionals to allow apps to drop –device=all and –device=usb permission, and support for sideloading from OCI repositories and archives.

This release also enables the NTSync unconditionally, and enables automatic branch following for extensions to ensure that “no-autodownload” extensions stay functional after an update that requires a new branch.

Flatpak 1.18 is now available for download from the project’s GitHub page. However, Flatpak being a component in your GNU/Linux distribution, it is highly recommended that you update it from the software repositories. The Flatpak devs recommend users and distributions update to this version as soon as possible.

Image credits: Logo courtesy of the Flatpak project

Source: 9to5 Linux