Nice to hear! It might be the case that you will have to do some tinkering at first, but I would really appreciate any info I can get so I can get this to be stable as fast as possible!

Fuck no

Honestly, I haven't even thought about that yet. I don't see anything speaking against using other init systems at first glance, but that's gonna be very low on my future priorities rn. If I should have some spare time after checking every mayor box then sure, I don't mind systemd but I'm also not a huge fan.

HiroshimaOS

Yeah I get you, recently with everyone vibe-coding their stuff, there have been a lot of useless distros, but I really feel like I'm onto something useful. I'm self employed and basically temporarily took on less orders so I can work on this full-time until I get the first version out and actual full on development turns into maintaining and improving. I can definitely manage it and actually look forward to it as it's super fun to me! Also I used today to make some changes as you can read in the comment I just left.

Stable vs Unstable does not mean anything to do with bugginess or prone to breakage.

It literally just means package version changes.

Stable meaning packages update slowly and only minor versions or security.

Unstable means packages update frequently including major versions

Inherently rolling releases are unstable.

My personal experience too is that Arch has been the best distro for lack of bugs and issues on my machines than Fedora or Debian etc.

Can't speak much about OP's distro or CachyOS, but I can talk about how Fedora Atomic differs from simply doing btrfs backups before every update.

First, updates are not the only thing that can modify the base system. Installing packages, installing plugins or extensions, manual user modifications, etc, can all end up bricking the system. Fedora Atomic makes the base system immutable so that the only way of making modifications is via rpm-ostree, which ensures that you always have a way to rollback.

Second, one of the issues with traditional update mechanisms is that over time, updates might not do proper clean-up and leave artifacts. This is a harder problem than people realize, because users can have all sorts of permutations of packages and versions installed, and the update mechanism has to account for all of them. Over time, and many updates, a system can accumulate tons of small update errors and finally fall over. I've had this issue myself and heard of this issue from multiple sources. Fedora Atomic solves this by ensuring that every update is like a complete re-install.

Third, since every Fedora Atomic user uses the same base system as their distro maintainers, they can be sure that their base system is well tested. Bugs are more reproducible, and thus can be fixed faster. None of those "works on my system, you're on your own" issues.

Fourth, this one isn't a benefit to the user but the community. Fedora Atomic (and universal blue) distros are easy to fork. This is why there are so many flavors now. Bluefin, Aurora, Bazzite, Secureblue, Wayblue, etc. Instead of one generic distro with a huge community relying on a few maintainers, like Fedora used to have, now you have smaller specialized communities with their own leaders, and users can choose which community they align with more. And you can even switch communities, since rpm-ostree allows you to "rebase" to a different distro (eg Aurora -> Bazzite).

Very simple reason: you won't even notice that something broke since the distro will fall back onto the previous version automatically

Check out the comment I just left, I implemented a solution that pacman is now completely usable so it's literally just vanilla Arch but atomic instead of being Flatpak-only!