If you use Flatpak apps extensively and ever wish for a graphical tool to easily review app permissions and adjust to your needs, Flatseal is an application perfectly made for you.
Yesterday, a new version 1.7.0 of Flatseal was released by Martin Abente Lahaye. He is also the creator of the Portfolio file manager app.
What Is Flatseal?
Flatseal is a free and open-source GUI app that lets you modify permissions for Flatpak applications.
For the sake of system security, every Flatpak app runs in a sandbox environment. Hence, it needs permissions to access parts of the system or hardware.
Though you can still use the Flatpak command-line tool, Flatseal provides a graphical interface to configure a list of permissions such as:
- Share (Network, IPC)
- Socket (X11, Wayland)
- Device (GPU, Virtualization, Shared Memory)
- Allow (Syscalls, Bluetooth)
- Filesystem
- Persistent (Files)
- Environment Variables
- System Bus
- Session Bus
Even in the latest v1.7.0, Flatseal brought initial support portal permissions like Notifications, Background, Microphone, Camera, and Location. However, it has only activated Background and Notifications permission to grant to the app.
The best thing about Flatseal is its very simple and easy-to-use user interface. Even the UI is responsive and adaptive for mobile devices.
Flatseal has a two-pane interface design: one pane contains the list of all installed Flatpak apps and the other shows details and config options of the selected app.
Moreover, if you mess anything wrong or deliberately wants to restore permissions to their default values, the app also provides a “Reset” button.
The last but not least, Flatseal also now comes with offline documentation. So, if you want to know more about the permissions available and tips and tricks to use them, refer to the online or offline docs.
How To Install Flatseal On Linux?
Since Flatseal is also a Flatpak app, it is available to download from the Flathub repository.
If you’ve set up the Flatpak on your Linux system, you can install it by running a single command:
$ flatpak install flathub com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
Or, if you want to build the app from its source code, clone the repository and run the following commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal.git
$ cd Flatseal
$ flatpak-builder --force-clean --repo=repo build com.github.tchx84.Flatseal.json
$ flatpak build-bundle repo flatseal.flatpak com.github.tchx84.Flatseal
$ flatpak install flatseal.flatpak
