Bazaar 0.9.0 Ships with Markdown Support, Performance Tweaks, and a Rebuilt Curated Tab
The Flatpak-first store for GNOME/Linux gets a redesigned curated section, background caching improvements, and a new hedgehog mascot.
Bazaar 0.9.0 has officially landed, and the changelog reads like a maintenance sprint that accidentally became the biggest feature drop yet. The release brings markdown rendering for app descriptions, a complete rewrite of the background caching layer, and a curated tab so fundamentally different from the previous version that it drops every config file Bazaar has ever consumed.
The project was built to solve one very specific Linux desktop problem. Flatpak is the dominant universal package format on Linux, but the default store interfaces have always been a compromise. Bazaar runs as a background service, handles multiple simultaneous downloads without freezing the UI, and weighs in at a mere 8 MiB on Flathub. Bluefin, Bazzite, and Aurora already ship it as their default app store, and monthly downloads hover around 33,000.
Under the Hood
The headline improvements here live in the engine room. Alexander Van Hee offloaded cache reads to the I/O scheduler, batches disk enumeration, and built an entry group cache that should shave noticeable time off large library loads. Search typing feels less stuttery. Image downloads run on a configurable worker pool instead of blocking the main thread. If you've ever watched GNOME Software choke on a full Flathub index, the difference will be immediately apparent.
Markdown support now handles tables, images, app tiles, and remote articles. The renderer pulls syntax highlighting through gtksourceview, and web views use WebKitGTK for embedded content. It's a practical upgrade for developers publishing documentation directly from the app metadata.
The redesigned curated tab is the one change that demands attention. Van Hee swapped out the underlying curation system entirely, which means every YAML configuration file from Bazaar 0.8.x and earlier is incompatible. The new example file lives in the repository, and distributors who rely on the curated page will need to migrate before the next system update. Power users with hand-tuned blocklists or search biases should expect to retest their setups.
Flatpak itself jumped to 1.18.0, and ostree moved to the 2026.2 release. Translation updates landed for Czech, Basque, Japanese, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Cornish, French, Russian, German, and Spanish. Accessibility patches are quietly stacked throughout the release, with the featured carousel announcing itself to screen readers, install buttons getting proper text labels, and the license dialog getting a full redesign.
On the lighter side, community artist Melody dropped a new mascot. She's a hedgehog. She doesn't have a name yet, and the development team is leaving that vote to the crowd. The project runs entirely on Ko-Fi donations, and kolunmi explicitly asked readers to fund Van Hee first. Open source maintenance isn't cheap, and that's not even the full story of how much backend work Van Hee has absorbed over the last six months.
It's a rather dense release for a project still in beta, though the design and small footprint do help it somewhat. However, at the same time, the hard break on configuration files will irk a handful of maintainers who expected forward compatibility. The win here is straightforward. Bazaar continues to prove that Flatpak doesn't need to be managed by a bloated system package manager, and the caching work makes it noticeably friendlier for hardware with slower drives.
Grab it from Flathub or get the source from GitHub.
