To see the future, run in a terminal:

$ wget https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/keys/nightly.gpg

$ flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly-apps https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo-apps/ $ flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo/

$ flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Platform master

$ flatpak install gnome-nightly-apps org.gnome.Nautilus master

$ killall nautilus # No running instance has to be present

$ flatpak run org.gnome.Nautilus

*for Ubuntu look at the end of the post.

Results in:

Nautilus from master, updated everyday, parallel installable, in less than 3 minutes. I cannot believe this is possible. Note that due to be sandboxed with no permission handling there are things that are not working, like opening with an application.

For someone not aware of the whole platform and the Linux desktop, it’s difficult to see how many implications this bring to us and the changes that will allow in the upcoming months. This truly changes the game for GNOME (and any other desktop) as a project and platform, including 3rd party developers and companies using Linux desktops or that want to support it.

Amazing job Alex Larsson! Flatpak is the big step we needed.

In case of using Ubuntu, flatpak is still not in main repositories, it should arrive soon. In the meantime do: $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexlarsson/flatpak && sudo apt update && sudo apt install flatpak And then run the commands at the start of the post.