Hello, A specter is haunting the GNU/Linux ecosystem: the specter of per-user containerization. Software like Flatpak and Snappy promise fully sandboxed GNU/Linux application bundles (instead of merely launching an application with fewer privileges but without hiding the operating system, like Bubblewrap or Firejail do). Bundles ship with the version of their dependencies which they need. Dependencies are not force-upgraded with the operating system, but easily upgradable by the bundle creator. The same files in different bundles and versions are deduplicated to save space. Applications can be containerized once for all modern GNU/Linux operating systems. Unlike Docker, Flatpak works without root privileges. Flatpak allows you to run, say, a sandboxed and containerized copy of LibreOffice where opening an infected file can only cause harm to what the sandbox has access to, but not compromise the integrity of the system as a whole. Untrustworthy games can be isolated and run without fear of a system compromise. More generally, most GUI applications should probably be installed to and run from a Flatpak sandbox. This has major implications for traditional package managers. Pacman would be demoted to providing the base system on top of which Flatpak bundles downloaded from elsewhere are run (e.g. from gnome.org or from reallytheofficialwebsiteoflibreofficeipromise.com). However, I would prefer having a unified pacman-like interface for installing containerized and non-containerized applications. I believe a PKGBUILD is a good way to specify how to build an application for Flatpak as well. I do not want to lose the many packages from Arch and derivative distributions. tl;dr: Therefore I started writing a tool called pacpak which uses pacman to populate Flatpak application bundles. Its interface is meant to be similar to pacman’s. For example, in order to install gedit into a Flatpak application using a bundle of the gnome packages as a runtime, you install pacpak from the AUR and use: $ pacpak -S Base xterm You can run the resulting application like this: $ flatpak run $(hostname).app.xterm pacpak is still in its early alpha stages. I do not currently have the time to devote more than a day per week to its development. However, I’d like some feedback on the basic idea. I am also looking for a home for the project in the longer term, since I do not currently like to administer a bug tracker on my own rented server and dislike centralizing all free software development on GitHub or Sourceforge (I’d rather administer my own then). This will only be helpful once all the basic features are implemented of course. I would be glad if pacpak or a similar tool eventually becomes an official Arch project. Let me conclude by thanking those who develop Flatpak, those who package and maintain Flatpak for Arch and all the other Arch and free software developers we rely on. Regards, Florian Pelz