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+Fedora 24 is very near the best linux distro release I've used period, certainly the best release I've tested this year. That said, it has a couple of very serious problems 
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+Long time Fedora users are more than likely conservative when it comes to upgrades. Historically new Fedora releases tend to start out a bit rocky. The wise Fedora user gives a new Fedora release a couple of months to let the kinks work out and the updates flow in. Giving a new Fedora release time before updating also means all the latest packages in RPM Fusion have been updated as well.
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+Far more valuable than updated apps though, you can skip catastrophic bugs like the way that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update. Fedora 24 shipped with Linux kernel 4.5 and managed to miss kernel 4.6 by about two weeks, which is a shame because no less than Linus Torvalds himself called kernel 4.6 "a fairly big release - more commits than we've had in a while." In other words, potentially something worth waiting a few weeks to ship.
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+The let's wait a bit logic is of course a slippery slope, but in this case Fedora seems to have erred on the wrong side and updating to Fedora 24 has been fraught with problems for many users.
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+At this point though, most of the bugs have been worked out. In fact I did most of my Fedora testing on the Dell XPS 13 I reviewed early for Ars and found Fedora 24 to be a far smoother experience than Ubuntu 16.04. That said, if you have a Skylake chip, proceed cautiously.
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+## GNOME 3.20
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+Fedora 24 ships with a slew of desktop options, everything from the very lightweight LXDE to the flagsip offering: GNOME 3.20. Because Fedora is closely tied to GNOME, I've done the majority of my testing on GNOME 3.20, which includes a host of new features, including a revamped Software app and my personal favorite, GNOME Maps.
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+## Fedora 24 and Flatpaks
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+Fedora's repos remain as they always have been, generally complete, not on the scale of Debian, but 95% of what most users will want are there, with a few curious exceptions like VLC (which is in the [EPEL repos](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL), but not any of the repos that ship with a new release of Fedora). 
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+However, the number of packages in a distro's repo might not matter much in the near future. Thanks to Flatpak and Snap packages, both of which enjoy preliminary support in Fedora 24, you're not limited to installing just the packages available via repos. Just what is a Flatpak app and how it it different that a good old RPM package?
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+The big difference is that Flatpak apps are self-contained packages that ship all their dependencies in a single container. This neatly solves dependency conflicts. With RPM (or Deb) apps if one app requires someusefullib-1.0 and another app needs someusefullib-2.0 you have a problem. With Flatpaks that will never come up because both versions of someusefullib can be installed in each apps respective sandbox container.
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+There is a potential way to eat up more disk space with this method. After all, what happens when two apps requires the exact same dependency? Installing it twice would be wasteful, but linking the two would ruin the self-contained part of the process. Right now that is indeed a problem for both flatpak and Ubuntu's Snap packages, which also work in Fedora 24. For example the Snap version of LibreOffice is nearly four times the size of the distro package. The same is true of Gimp. This is, as they say, a known issue. Unfortunately, from what I can tell the solution means bundling fewer dependencies (and relying on the underlying system to provide the non-bundled dependencies), which puts Flatpak/Snap app right back with RPM for Deb packages. 
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+It's still early days for both technologies though and frankly the increased disk size is the least of Flatpak and Snap's problems. Getting either system install and and working is still disappointedly complex and involves adding gpg keys, which is pretty much the usability kiss of death. There is support for Flatpak in GNOME Software, which will solve much of the usability problem, but it was a bit buggy in my experience (in some cases Flatpak apps would not install). Still, assuming that the user experience is improved, which, granted, may be huge assumption to make, containerized apps have much to recommend them -- it's sort of like enabling the AUR for every distro. 
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+And that's a big part of the appeal -- Flatpaks put the actual app developers in control. There's no need to restrict your app to using older versions of dependencies that ship with a distro when you can just bundle the latest and greatest as part of your package. In that sense Flatpaks are most appealing for seldom updated distros like Debian, but have much less to offer rolling distros like Arch.
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+If you want to be cynical, Flatpak and Snaps are just the latest effort in a long line of attempts to create a cross-distro, write-once, run-anywhere system for Linux. Past efforts include systems like AppImage and of course the current hotness driving the development of Flatpaks -- Docker and friends. Docker (and similar efforts with smaller publicity departments) have changed the way apps are deployed on servers, but it's still unclear whether the same sort of system will succeed on the desktop. Which is to say that there turn out to be more challenges to overcome on the desktop. To pick one small example, Flatpak apps do not seem to take advantage of the new improved font rendering in Fedora 24, which leaves them looking out of place in the same way that a Qt app often looks out of place in a GTK-based desktop (or vice versa).
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+As it stands I've been playing with Snap and Flatpaks, but I can't recommend them for anyone but the Linux enthusiast who wants to experiment. Setting them up is complicated and frankly the apps available aren't apps you really want. Most distros ship with the current stable version of apps like LibreOffice, Inkscape and Gimp anyway -- Fedora 24 does anyway -- and for now I suggest sticking with those versions. 
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+GNOME 3.20's Software app also supports Flatpak, which was previously called XDG-App and offers tightly sandboxed applications for greater security and easier updates. The main Flatpak app available to test at the time of Fedora 24's release is LibreOffice. The LibreOffice website has <a href="http://www.libreoffice.org/download/flatpak/">instructions</a> on how to get it working. I had no trouble getting it running, but be sure to note the issues listed at the bottom of the page, several of which may be deal breakers. 
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+Because of the tight sandboxing, Flatpak-based apps are not yet able to pass data to other applications. For example the Flatpak version of LibreOffice can't automatically open links in your browser. The Flatpak version of LibreOffice also doesn't yet include a Java Runtime Environment, which means that any LibreOffice functionality that requires a JRE will not work.
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+Suffice to say that while Flatpak apps (or possibly on the competing app packaging systems like Ubuntu's Snap package) look like the future of Linux applications, they're not there yet. The future of sandboxed apps looks bright, if somewhat distant.
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+Closer to complete is Fedora 24's Wayland support. Wayland sessions still aren't the default for Fedora 24, but they work well enough that it seems safe to assume they'll be the default for Fedora 25 (barring unforeseen bugs). I encountered a few Wayland-related problems, but by and large the experience is getting very close to "just works". The major exception for my use case is that screenshots almost never seem to work, so everything you see here comes from an X.org session.
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+* GNOME 3.20
+* font rendering
+* First release with feature complete dnf
+* wayland
+* updated shotwell
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+The Fedora project has released Fedora 24. The biggest news in the default desktop version of Fedora 24 -- which the Fedora project refers to as the Workstation edition -- is GNOME 3.20 and continuing improvements to Fedora's Wayland support, which is close to finished, but still not the default option in this release.
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+I've been very impressed with dnf. especially the little touches that move it beyond most package managers.
+ For example if you type a command that's not found DNF will step in, and, if the command is available, it will ask if you'd like to install it. It's a small thing, but as someone who sets up a lot of linux rigs it's incredibly helpful and saves not just a small step, but the frustration of needing to take that small step. I need to find a way to make Pacman do the same thing.
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+Despite all that Fedora 24 hasn't convinced me to give up Arch, but that's not a totally fair comparison in the first place since much of what I like about Arch is that it's a rolling release. So no, I still prefer rolling, but if I were going to move to a release oriented distro it would unquestionably by Fedora 24, which is leaps and bounds beyond anything else I've tested this year, including Ubuntu and Mint, which both suffer from the morass of bugs and incomplete features that is Ubuntu 16.04.
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