Flatpak

Flatpak manages sandboxed desktop applications pulled from remotes like Flathub.

mpm covers applications only: every listing passes --app, so runtimes and SDKs stay out of scope. Listings are requested with --columns=name,application,version --ostree-verbose and parsed as tab-separated rows.

Note

All operations target the system-wide scope except cleanup which only repairs the user installation. Per-scope targeting (system vs user) is tracked in #1725.

Caution

outdated reads each pending update’s latest version from remote-ls --updates, then runs one flatpak info per package to recover its installed version: a follow-up CLI call for every outdated app.

Note

Brewfile backups emit the bare flatpak "id" form: mpm does not capture each app’s origin remote, so brew bundle install restores through Flathub and non-Flathub apps must be edited in by hand.

Platforms

  • 🅱️ BSD

  • 🐧 Linux

  • ⨂ Unix

Operations

Operation

Supported

Notes

installed

✓

outdated

✓

search

✓

exact and extended search backfilled by mpm

install

✓

upgrade

✓

upgrade_all

✓

remove

✓

sync

cleanup

✓

Ecosystem

Usage

$ mpm --flatpak installed
$ mpm --flatpak search "query"
$ mpm --flatpak upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:flatpak/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --flatpak upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-flatpak, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line

  • CLI names, in lookup order: flatpak

The version is probed by running:

$ flatpak --version
Flatpak 1.4.2

and extracted with:

r"Flatpak\s+(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown

State of Flatpak’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

  • Status: ❌ None

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Flatpak well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ flatpak list --app --columns=name,application,version             > --ostree-verbose
Peek	com.uploadedlobster.peek	1.3.1
Fragments	de.haeckerfelix.Fragments	1.4
GNOME MPV	io.github.GnomeMpv	0.16
Syncthing GTK	me.kozec.syncthingtk	v0.9.4.3
Builder	org.flatpak.Builder

$ flatpak remote-ls --app --updates --columns=name,application,version                 --ostree-verbose
GNOME Dictionary	org.gnome.Dictionary	3.26.0
Files	org.gnome.Nautilus	42.2