We are happy to announce the creation of a new family of Fedora Linux spins: Fedora Atomic Desktops! As Silverblue has grown in popularity, we’ve seen more of our mainline Fedora Linux spins make the jump to offer a version that implements rpm-ostree. It’s reached the point where it can be hard to talk about all of them at the same time. Therefore we’ve introduced a new brand that will serve to simplify how we discuss rpm-ostree and how we name future atomic spins.
↫ Joseph Gayoso for Fedora Magazine
You can get pretty much any major desktop environment as an rpm-ostree (inaccurately referred to as ‘immutable’) version of Fedora, so it makes sense to standardise the naming scheme.
This is probably one of the largest unintentional Google contributions to Linux.
By developing Chrome OS in the immutable state, which led to clones including Core OS, which later (after a few more migrations) became Fedora Silverblue, we now have a much more stable and deterministic path to OS updates.
(There are also many other contributions along this path of course, I was talking about the initial spark. And declarative OS is not new either. We had puppet and others for a long time).
The only thing that is missing is, I would have preferred Gentoo go in a similar way (btw, Chrome OS is based on Gentoo)