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.
This might solve the issue with flatpak nvidia driver versions not being removed and accumulating over time. AMD/Intel don’t have this issue as a single flatpak mesa driver version can work with multiple system drivers. Nvidia’s closed source driver needs an exact version match to allow for flatpak’s sandboxed GUI apps to work.
At least that’s how I understand it, take it with a grain of salt.
There is actually a mechanism that allows distros to register the system level driver as flatpak extension, so the driver is available in the sandbox. Unfortunately, almost no distro uses that :-/
That though would make it break when the host system updates glibc, just like it does in snappy.
Its only really for nvidia which goes out of its way to be portable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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 original article contains 223 words, the summary contains 142 words. Saved 36%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
At first, I read it as “will now automatically receive obsolete driver versions” and was like “WHY?!” 😂
