While GNOME / Red Hat developers have been leading the Flatpak app sandboxing initiative, KDE developers are making progress too with embracing Flatpak as a more convenient and secure way of securely packaging Linux desktop apps.

The latest on the KDE + Flatpak front is that Jan Grulich has been getting a KDE implementation of Flatpak's "Portals" working. Portals are the APIs offered to the sanboxed apps for essentially escaping the sandbox for certain operations.

Via Flatpak Portals, apps can access the file chooser, app chooser, printers, display notifications, etc. Of course, many of those items are rather desktop-specific if wanting to offer an integrated UI experience, so Grulich has been leading the charge on the KDE support.

The most common Flatpak Portals for KDE should now be implemented. There still is more work to be done, but xdg-desktop-portal-kde appears to be becoming quite usable. KDE users wishing to learn more about the state can do so via this blog post.