Linux

With power comes responsibility. Flexibility is power, and the easier it is to modify core system components, the easier it is for you to mess them up as well.

I am not a Fedora Atomic maintainer or lead, so this is just my perspective from the outside, but the core ideology behind it is to have a tailored opinionated experience for user. I remember Bluefin's lead dev saying something like "I want that 'defaults' lifestyle". It's the experience of having everything just work out of the box, and be maintained for you.

With Fedora Atomic, the user chooses less responsibility, and thus has less power.

On the flip side you have NixOS and Arch. Maximum power and maximum responsibility. If the world starts moving towards a new window compositor (think X11 -> Wayland), you now have to figure out how to do that migration yourself. If there are customizations that you added that aren't Wayland compatible, you have to figure out how to work them out. It's a ton of little decisions. Whereas for an opinionated distro, you just trust that the maintainers handled it and just update your system. Which is exactly what happened for me, as a Fedora user. One day I was using X11, and then the next I was using Wayland, no manual configuration on my part.

This is why I recommend atomic distros to beginners. Beginners don't have the knowledge to handle the responsibility of maintaining a distro. They don't know why X11 is insecure, what systemd is, how linux permissions work. They need these guard rails. Once they get more familiar with the ecosystem they can choose to install a more customizeable distro.