Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts.

Flatpak 1.17.1 introduces support for building OCI bundles with Zstd compressed layers. Leveraging Zstd rather than the default Gzip is said to speed-up compression by "several times" and result in about a 20% smaller size. But Gzip is still being kept the default compression format rather than Zstandard in order to ensure maximum compatibility. This OCI layer Zstd compression support stems from a two year old pull request for adding –oci-layer-compress=zstd support.

Today’s Flatpak release also now allows for OCI remotes to be configured to check a matching signature in a standard OCI signature storage lookaside service and support for the extra-mechanism data with OCI images to help in enabling H.265 playback in Fedora Flatpaks.

Beyond the Open Container Initiative (OCI) changes libsoup2 has been replaced by libcurl, support for conditional permissions added for shared subsystems and features, progress escape sequences are now enabled by default, and various other fixes and enhancements.

Downloads and more details on today’s Flatpak 1.17.1/1.17.2 release via GitHub.