No, it's based on ostree for system distribution (which Colin had been developing since 2011), and using flatpak for applications. This had been a goal of the R

No, it's based on ostree for system distribution (which Colin had been developing since 2011), and using flatpak for applications. This had been a goal of the Red Hat desktop team for a while (see also: Stateless Linux from the 90s), but it took a long time for the community to realize the benefits. Other approaches here are the ChromeOS image style updates, CoreOS's image style updates, systemd's btrfs based OS distribution, and quite a few more throughout history. It's a good idea. Collabora's SingularityOS they built for Valve for the original SteamOS was going to use ostree, but for various reasons (poor ones), they didn't ship that.