Flatpak 1.11.1 Brings Changes For Steam, Better Support For Command Line Programs

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 26 April 2021 at 08:48 AM EDT. 35 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
Flatpak 1.11.1 is out this morning as the first development step towards the eventual Flatpak 1.12 stable release.

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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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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