Flatpak 1.11.1 Brings Changes For Steam, Better Support For Command Line Programs
Being the first development release of the new series, Flatpak 1.11.1 does bring some notable feature changes. One of the changes with Flatpak 1.11.1 worth mentioning is allowing sub-sandboxes to have a different /usr and/or /app. This feature is being used initially by the Flatpak Steam effort to launch games within its own container run-time showing up as a replaced /usr. Basically, being able to handle the Steam Linux Runtime within a Flatpak sandboxed environment.
Flatpak 1.11.1 also has better support for text-user interface / command-line programs such as the GNU Debugger (GDB) and Nano text editor. The issue up to now was the "TERM" environment variable not being exposed to contained software, which broken Ncurses-based programs. With TERM now passed in Flatpak-Enter, the likes of GDB and Nano should work within Flatpak.
Flatpak 1.11.1 also now shares the same /tmp directory and $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR among all instances of the same app-ID software. There is also optional support for sharing the same /dev/shm shared memory directory.
This development release also has fixes for test failures on non-x86_64 hardware and a variety of other fixes. Downloads and more details on this development milestone towards Flatpak 1.12 can be found via GitHub.
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