Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.

One of the interesting changes with Flatpak 1.17.7 is being able to report the age of the configuration was added to libflatpak. Yes, at first when seeing "age" in the release notes, thoughts immediately went to all the recent concerns around [1]age attestation laws and the like. Fortunately, this feature for Flatpak 1.17.7 is a good one and is just about the age of the Flatpak configuration data to provide much better efficiency.

The [2]pull request to report the age of the configuration notes it being used to assist in cache invalidation and being sought after due to GNOME Software parsing AppStream metadata on startup. If knowing the age of the remotes configuration, GNOME Software can use it to significantly reduce start-up time -- around four seconds to the GNOME Software start-up time as noted.

Flatpak 1.17.7 also improves how the absence of the system repo is handled, changes to the repos are now more atomic, improvements to the build system, and other enhancements. More details on Flatpak 1.17.7 via [3]GitHub .

[4]XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.21.2 was also released with a target selection for the screenshot portal and pipewire-serials to the ScreenCast Portal streams.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/age+attestation

[2] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/6532

[3] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/releases/tag/1.17.7

[4] https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/releases/tag/1.21.2