Flatpak

Flatpak
Developer(s) Alex Larsson, Flatpak Team
Initial release September 2015 (2015-09)[1]
Stable release
1.0.4 / 12 October 2018 (2018-10-12)[2]
Repository
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Written in C
Operating system Linux
Type Application virtualization
License LGPL[3]
Website flatpak.org

Flatpak (formerly xdg-app) is a software utility for software deployment, package management, and application virtualization for Linux desktop computers. It provides a sandbox environment in which users can run applications in isolation from the rest of the system.[4][5] Applications using Flatpak need permission from the user to control hardware devices or access the user's files.[6]

The idea of using application containers in GNOME was first proposed in 2013 by Lennart Poettering,[5] who published an article about it in 2014.[7][8] Developed as part of the freedesktop.org project (formerly known as X Desktop Group or XDG),[9] it was originally called xdg-app.[10]

As of February 2017, some popular apps available as Flatpaks include Blender, Gimp,[11] LibreOffice,[12] Pitivi,[13] KDE Applications,[14] Linphone,[15] and GNOME Recipes.[16] There are also some unofficial Flatpaks such as development versions of Mozilla Firefox,[17] Skype,[18] and Spotify.[19]

Security issues

A team of researches has published a website flatkill.org[20] which questions some of the security claims made by Flatpak. Notable issues is the presence of outdated software with known vulnerabilities in the Flatpak repositories and ineffective sandboxing.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Flatpak's History". GitHub.
  2. ↑ "Releases · flatpak/flatpak". GitHub.
  3. ↑ "LGPL". xdg-app repository. freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2016-11-21.
  4. ↑ Larsson, Alexander (29 April 2016). "Using bubblewrap in xdg-app". Alexander Larsson: Cool links and commentary. GNOME. Retrieved 8 January 2016.
  5. 1 2 Willis, Nathan (2015-01-21). "GNOME and application sandboxing revisited". LWN. Retrieved 2016-01-03.
  6. ↑ Willis, Nathan (2015-08-12). "Working with xdg-app application bundles". LWN. Retrieved 2016-01-03.
  7. ↑ corbet (1 September 2014). "Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems". LWN. Retrieved 2016-10-31.
  8. ↑ Poettering, Lennart (1 September 2014). "Revisiting How We Put Together Linux Systems". Pid Eins.
  9. ↑ "Flatpak - the future of application distribution". Retrieved 2016-12-16.
  10. ↑ Larsson, Alexander (9 May 2016). "Renamed to flatpak in git". freedesktop.org. Retrieved 1 June 2016.
  11. ↑ "GIMP - Downloads". www.gimp.org.
  12. ↑ "LibreOffice in Flatpak format". LibreOffice. Retrieved 1 June 2016.
  13. ↑ "Pitivi-download". Pitivi. Retrieved 1 July 2016.
  14. ↑ "kde-applications". KDE Flatpak. Retrieved 1 March 2017.
  15. ↑ Linphone, retrieved 2017-09-19
  16. ↑ Sneddon, Joey (2016-12-07). "Yum! GNOME Recipes is a New Cooking App for Linux". OMG! Ubuntu!. Retrieved 2017-12-24.
  17. ↑ "Unofficial Firefox Developer Edition flatpak repository". Unofficial Firefox Developer Edition flatpak repository. Retrieved 20 March 2017.
  18. ↑ "Alexander Larsson's github Flatpak build of skype". Alexander Larsson's github Flatpak build of skype. Retrieved 17 August 2017.
  19. ↑ "Alexander Larsson's github Flatpak build of spotify". Alexander Larsson's github Flatpak build of spotify. Retrieved 17 August 2017.
  20. ↑ "Flatpak - a security nightmare".
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