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.