Over seven months after the previous 1.16.1 release, Flatpak, a universal Linux packaging system for distributing desktop applications in sandboxed environments, has released version 1.16.2 as the second bugfix update in the 1.16 series.
One of the most practical user-facing changes is the addition of reinstall support for bundle installations. Until now, applications installed from local .flatpak bundle files required manual removal before reinstalling or updating. With 1.16.2, Flatpak can now cleanly overwrite an existing bundle-based installation, bringing bundle installs in line with repository-based workflows.
Hardware support also sees a targeted improvement, with the VA-API extension now enabled for Intel Xe GPUs. This allows Flatpak-packaged applications better to leverage hardware-accelerated video decoding on newer Intel graphics, improving media playback efficiency and performance where supported.
The release includes a wide range of bug fixes addressing stability and correctness issues. Several memory leaks and crash conditions have been resolved, along with multiple fixes to OCI image handling. Flatpak’s process management has been refined as well, with flatpak-kill no longer sending SIGKILL to all processes in the current process group, reducing the risk of unintended side effects.
Security and sandboxing edge cases were also addressed. A specific scenario in which the home directory could become unintentionally accessible due to a combination of a faulty GLib version and missing XDG directories has been fixed, tightening Flatpak’s isolation guarantees. Additional fixes improve the behavior of flatpak mask and flatpak pin by ensuring repository configurations are properly reloaded after changes made via the system helper.
On the build and tooling side, Flatpak now provides an empty /run/host/font-dirs.xml during builds, avoiding font-related issues in constrained environments. Internal changes include improvements to testing and continuous integration, the elimination of an uninitialized variable, and a new allowance for using sudo when changing the active user in Flatpak operations.
For more information, see the changelog.
Finally, the upcoming 1.18 release is shaped to introduce some exciting changes. The biggest update is expanded OCI support, which will let you install directly from OCI images, sideload from OCI repositories and archives, and use OCI remotes with collection IDs. Sandbox control is also getting better, with conditional permissions, a new --clear-env runtime option, host-root exporting for controlled access, and stronger isolation during builds.
