GUADEC 2025 / July 24, 2025
cpak at GUADEC 2025
Two years after the first commit, cpak reached the GUADEC stage in Brescia with a direct question: can the same OCI ecosystem used to ship services also become a good home for Linux desktop apps?
The talk introduced cpak as an OCI-compliant package format for devices, servers and graphical Linux applications. Existing image tooling remained useful, but the runtime did not need a container daemon and applications did not have to be rewritten around a portal API before they could reach the desktop.
The implementation has changed since that presentation. cpak v2 now has a versioned manifest, transactional updates, rollback, per-package permission overrides, a content-addressed store and a broker for narrow host operations. The principle discussed on stage remains the same: package the application as it exists, then make host integration an explicit runtime contract.
Bottles 66 is the first large desktop release to put that contract in front of users. It is also a useful checkpoint between the presentation and the work still ahead as cpak moves through its experimental release.