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).