My Linux Mint system upgraded tonight from 21.1 to 21.2. No problems, no drama. Just update, reboot, and keep going. There are all sorts of articles on the web about what’s new and what’s changed. For me there were no breaking changes, and that’s what really matters. I used to worry that I wasn’t running with the latest and greatest, but that’s no longer a concern. My primary concern now is stability followed by correctness. I don’t want a radical new desktop or even tweaks that force me out of long-built muscle memory (I’m looking at you, macOS).

I’m also quite pleased to have finally discovered the positives of using Flatpak. My first Flatpak installation was LibreOffice. I’ve now installed the Brave browser Flatpak. I really like Brave’s ability to turn off the system title bar and borders. Along with the minimal controls around the edges, the Brave browser is lean and clean. I’m going to be experimenting with it for a few weeks. I also like the Brave search engine. If you look closely you’ll see there are no ads. This is even better than DuckDuckGo.

I’m glad I’m supporting community distributions such as Linux Mint, and I’m glad the one I chose is downstream from Debian (via Ubuntu).

I wrote in an earlier post how I’d migrated from using LibreOffice native installation to LibreOffice flatpak installation. The primary reason for the migration was to get the latest LibreOffice release, which the flatpak provided but regular Linux Mint (meaning Debian/Ubuntu) did not provide. At the time of writing about the migration I was asked if the flatpak would stay up-to-date. I didn’t have an answer then, but I do now: the flatpak keeps up-to-date, as it did today on my Linux Mint installation.

The LibreOffice flatpak showed up as a regular update in Linux Mint’s Update Manager.

What was unusual was this “additional software” that was going to be installed along with the flatpak update. I accepted it.

When I checked LibreOffice’s version after the update, it was the latest. A check of the LibreOffice.org website showed at least 7.5.4; the final dot version number wasn’t there, but that’s not an issue.

Now more than ever I’m a solid user of applications via flatpak installation.

Link

how to install libreoffice flatpak