Flatpak 1.15.7 Will Now Automatically Remove Obsolete Driver Versions

Simon McVittie issued the Flatpak 1.15.7 pre-release on Wednesday with a few notable changes for this widely-used open-source app sandboxing and distribution framework.

Flatpak continues evolving nicely for this leading app sandbox and distribution solution widely used across many different Linux distributions that paired with Flathub make for very easy app access. Introduced in Flatpak 1.15.7 is now the ability to automatically remove obsolete driver versions and other auto-pruned refs. This will help eliminate excess baggage that builds up over time by automatically removing end-of-life runtimes that are no longer used. As the system is updated to use new drivers/run-times, the old ones can be automatically removed.

Flatpak 1.15.7 also adds the "--socket=inherit-wayland-socket" argument to inherit the existing Wayland socket environment and automatically reloads the D-Bus session bus configuration when installing or upgrading apps to ensure any exported D-Bus services are recognized.

Flatpak 1.15.7 also does away with its existing Autotools build system support in favor of Meson. The Meson build system has been working out great for Flatpak and now the sole build system, similar to many other open-source projects abandoning Autotools for Meson.

This Flatpak update is rounded out by a number of bug fixes ranging from D-Bus and Wayland issues to fixing memory leaks, improving async-signal safety, and documentation improvements.

More details on the Flatpak 1.15.7 development release via GitHub.