Amethyst Mod Manager ships v2.6.1, a rebuild to fix a Flatpak launch bug
ChrisDKN's Linux mod manager gets a patch that is mostly a version number with a purpose.
Here's the entire release note for v2.6.1, verbatim: "Rebuild of 2.6.0 to fix flatpak launch issue." One line. It went live on today, pushed out by an automated GitHub Actions bot.
For anyone tracking ChrisDKN's native Linux mod manager, terse is welcome, not alarming. This is a rebuild, not a feature drop. The commit behind it, 2ebe927, touched just two files, changed four lines and deleted one. Changelog.txt picked up a new entry. The version string in src/version.py flipped from 2.6.0 to 2.6.1.
That's the whole diff. No code changed. No bug fixed inside the manager itself. Amethyst simply got re-packaged into a fresh build, and the build that mattered here was the Flatpak, which hadn't been launching cleanly since 2.6.0.
Why a version bump matters here
v2.6.1 adds nothing. But it inherits the entire 2.6.0 feature set for free, which is worth spelling out given what that release actually shipped.
2.6.0 landed on October 29, 2026, straight out of a beta series with v2.6.0-beta.10 dropping the day before. It was the most ambitious update in the project's short life. The plugin system got reworked into something real, with plugins living in ~/.config/AmethystModManager/Plugins and pulling additions from the project's resources branch. Two ship by default: a Steam Workshop browser and a legacy installer for older C#-scripted .fomod and .omod files.
It also introduced a headless mode driven by JSON-RPC 2.0 over newline-delimited JSON, letting external scripts drive most of the app's functions without touching the Qt GUI. Batch calls cap at 256 items per request. The rest of the changelog covers new game support, automatic Steam overlay loading, Thunderstore share-code imports, and save-file portability, alongside seven bug fixes. v2.6.1 inherits all of that unchanged. It only repairs the packaging.
A rebuild you can actually measure
Because this is a rebuild rather than a rewrite, the whole story fits in the diff. Two files. Four additions. One deletion. It's a pure version bump in a release form factor, and it's fair to say few maintainers would be that blunt about it, the changelog says exactly what happened and nothing more.
The practical upshot is simple: if your v2.6.0 Flatpak wouldn't start, moving to v2.6.1 should clear it up. The AppImages were never broken, but they're rebuilt too, so there's no strong reason not to grab the latest regardless.
Five artifacts shipped alongside the bump, and the early download counts tell a small tale. The x86_64 AppImage reached 216 downloads, with its .zsync sidecar at 191. For what it's worth, the .zsync sidecar files are the part of AppImage distribution most people never think about, yet they're the difference between re-downloading 132 MB every update and grabbing a few stray megabytes. The aarch64 builds, Steam Deck territory, trail at four and one downloads, even though Deck users are arguably one of the tool's core audiences. The Flatpak bundle sits at 12.
That cadence is worth keeping in mind against the project's broader stats. The repository opened February 21, 2026, and the Nexus Mods listing went live a week later. Within roughly eight months Amethyst had pulled in about 1,300 GitHub stars, around 67 forks, over 3,250 commits, and several hundred NexusMods endorsements. That's an unusual pace for what is essentially a one-person hobby project. It's released under the permissive GPL-3.0 license.
How to grab v2.6.1
The Flatpak is the route most people should take, mostly because it updates itself. You can install it straight from the project's self-hosted remote:
flatpak install --user https://chrisdkn.github.io/Amethyst-Mod-Manager/amethyst.flatpakref
Updates also surface in the Discover store package manager. If you prefer the AppImage, an installer script handles the zsync incremental updates for you:
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ChrisDKN/Amethyst-Mod-Manager/main/src/appimage/Amethyst-MM-installer.sh | bash
Or grab the AppImage and .zsync directly from the release page. AUR users can install it via amethyst-mod-manager.
