Fedora Workstation 24 comes out with Flatpak package system
Flatpak is also officially released along with Fedora 24. Flatpak, formerly known as ‘xdg-app’, is a framework to run desktop applications for Linux in its own sandbox and is available for various Linux distributions. It is similar to Ubuntu’s ‘snap’.
Flatpak is a system for packaging applications in such a way that all dependencies are included. It is similar in that sense to the snap package system recently put forward by Canonical. Flatpak aims to solve the fragmentation on the Linux desktop by providing all the necessary dependencies in one package. The system uses data deduplication to save space. As with snap, the Document Foundation’s LibreOffice is one of the first applications to ship with a Flatpak.
Because Flatpak uses a sandbox, in principle the app can only access the necessary libraries and interfaces of the operating system. There is still a problem with sandboxing within an X11 environment; it contains security risks. These security vulnerabilities do not reside in Wayland, the graphical environment on which Fedora and other Linux distributions want to run their graphical desktop, according to Fedora.
The Wayland graphical manager is not yet enabled by default, but since XWayland has been approved as good enough, the community behind Fedora likes users to choose a Wayland session on the login screen. XWayland is the layer for applications that don’t run natively on Wayland, but actually need X11. Wayland will likely become the default from Fedora 25 onwards.
In addition to Flatpak, there are some other notable changes in Fedora 24, such as the use of a graphical update mechanism from within the Gnome Software app within the Gnome 3.20 desktop.