Together with my then-colleague Kalev Lember, I recently added support for pre-installing Flatpak applications. It sounds fancy, but it is conceptually very simple: Flatpak reads configuration files from several directories to determine which applications should be pre-installed. It then installs any missing applications and removes any that are no longer supposed to be pre-installed (with some small caveats).


What’s the advantage of this over a whole-system provisioning system like ansible?
From what I can tell, you wouldn’t use it instead of Ansible or another automation system, but rather just support for a config file you can plot in to make setting up automation with any automation system easier by allowing you to put it into a file rather than a gigantic Flatpak install command.