No barriers here. As a developer by trade, I was attracted to “Cloud Native” or atomic Linux exactly for its promises of reliable, managed OS, while promoting containers as first class interactions.

For the same reason I ditched Windows and Gentoo over 15 years ago for MacOS, and now for 4 months to Bluefin Linux as a daily driver (an amazing, batteries-included OS based on uBlue -> Fedora Atomic), I’m happy to give up some freedoms to have a regular workflow that is easy and streamlined, and best yet, whether it works or not is “somebody else’s problem.” And if an OS image ever fails to load, rollback is automatic and seamless to the last known bootable image.

Yes, there are some limitations, like if you want/need a kernel extension that isn’t officially supported by the maintainers, or you want to tear out systemd, or you really want X11 (it’s gone as of upstream Fedora 42), but as someone with not enough free time to tinker, I’d rather just have an OS that’s continually updated and boots to desktop flawlessly every time.

Works great for web browsing, gaming, software development, and spinning up new containers and VMs to try stuff I want to check out :) After much success running Bluefin on a miniPC desktop and my laptop, I wiped away Windows 10 for Bazzite on my gaming rig and couldn’t be happier.

The biggest issue for me getting into this new paradigm was just re-wiring old habits. More documentation would help in that regard, as getting familiar with how to do old things in this new way where system and userspace are deliberately separated, was a little confusing. Maybe it was my bad for not understanding as much in detail about Docker/Podman specifics before, and being on SELinux for the first time was a bit of a learning curve.

There is and always will be a place for non-atomic Linux, and I think anybody who wants to really tinker and exert total control over their system should stick to it! But as far as I’m concerned, the only way I’ll be running non-atomic on a personal machine is in a container.

It’s worth checking out Blue95, which was originally made as a novelty but has all the power of uBlue behind it, as an opinionated, batteries-included Linux based on Fedora.