Exactly.

So as an explanation, Fedora Atomic is like Git for your OS. This means the OS keeps track of every package, what is where etc. On the server lays a fresh, recent image, assembled by the Fedora people. They ship really recent software and these images are well tested and should just work.

This is exactly the state you have on a regular Distro, after installing the ISO (and nothing went wrong). But what happens now? You install, uninstall, move, compile, write stuff to system directories, etc.

In the end we have 100 Ubuntu users with 100 different systems. "I have this issue but nobody else has it", yes because your system is unique and you have no idea why.

Meanwhile Android does the exact opposite, since forever. And that sucks. But as apps are highly confined and the system is read-only (lol often not even readable) you have no viruses.

Fedora Atomic with rpm-ostree does a thing in between. You have your Operating system, good as it is. But in Fedora for example there are Codecs missing so Firefox or direct Binaries like Davinci Resolve will give you a hard time.

You can "layer" packages though, that means from then on you have the official image plus a transparent set of extra packages. If you find out this breaks something, do rpm-ostree uninstall PACKAGE and that layer is gone.

If you want to reset your system entirely, do rpm-ostree reset (this is not android-level yet, you still need to remove /var /etc and more.)

Also there are containers. They are not virtual machines because they use your systems kernel. But you can install all those nasty dependencies you need for example for that one old app, for building software etc. Using Toolbox or Distrobox this is really easy.

So before modifying the system, you can use that instead. Still, you can modify your system a lot, add repos, etc.

Then comes universalBlue. They do the modifying BEFORE sending the images to your client. So the modifications are not your own, and errors may already be discovered when you would get them. Also, having the changes there reduces the load on your machine, all you do is download, build, reboot, done. Automatically.

This is so much better than Windowd Updates, more secure and with no boot delay AT ALL. That fact alone is a crazy selling point.

If you ask yourself "why should I need this", just think about how your OS will look like in 5 years. So many changes, but using rpm-ostree you are always just one command away from having a "fresh install" experience.