Flatpak Support Is Now "Production Ready" In KDE Discover

It seems to be a busy weekend for KDE news... The latest is that the Flatpak app sandboxing support formerly known as XDG-App is considered production ready within KDE Discover.

KDE Discover, the closest thing currently to an "app store" on the KDE desktop and for managing add-ons and installing other packages, now has vetted Flatpak support. Going back a year KDE Discover has been working on Flatpak support as well as Ubuntu Snap/Snappy support but now the Flatpak support is in good standing.

KDE developer Nathaniel Graham has written a summary about the Flatpak support in Discover. Assuming you have the Flatpak back-end installed, Flatpak repositories can be added, there is easy support for switching between Flatpak repositories (e.g. stable and unstable versions), Flathub support, and much more.

Those wishing to learn more about the inner-workings of the Flatpak support within KDE Discover can read all about it on Nate's blog. Improvements are coming with KDE Plasma 5.12 and Nathan is also encouraging interested users to petition the Linux distributions to improve their Flatpak support too. Hopefully as 2018 moves on we'll see the Flatpak support mature on more distributions and become readily available and widely used.