There was a very active naming discussion in the mentioned thread, and discussions around naming also affect what namespace we’ll use moving forward in Forgejo and other places for the base images that will come from the initiative. We did spend some time discussing it in a December meeting, and we did some brainstorming.[1]
We came up for some potential names for the initiative and the resulting project, did an initial vote to find the top names, and now we’d like to ask the community to vote with us.
What should we call the initiative formerly known as the Fedora bootc initiative? You can select up to two options as favorites.
Fedora Atomic
Fedora Image Mode
Fedora Cloud Native
Fedora Container Native
0voters
I’ll close the poll on 19 January 2026 at 1500 UTC.
If there’s a name you think we missed or something you’d rather have, please feel free to add a comment!
How does the name “Fedora Atomic” relate to the already existing Fedora Atomic Desktop variants which are (currently) built out of ostree-commits directly; instead of bootc containers.
Will the bootc initiative take both under their umbrella or are they still distinct groups, and if the former; has this been discussed with the spin maintainers for the current Fedora Atomic variants?
Given that we already use Fedora Atomic, I think that name could cause a lot of confusion (Fedora Atomic, or sometimes Fedora Atomics, is a common abbreviation for Fedora Atomic Desktops, and in some contexts I am quite sure to have seen it also as “summary term” for Atomic Desktops + CoreOS)
This is an important concern for sure and we would want at least rough consensus with stakeholders from that group.
My thoughts are that we’re simply merging the two, using “atomic” as a generic name for image-based container-oriented operating system projects in Fedora (+ derivatives) which spans all use cases (single user desktops, cloud, edge, etc.).
Sure but that would change as part of this I think.
Probably indeed a good idea to indeed get buy-in from the SIG(s) that currently use the Atomic name, hopefully before the outcome of this poll becomes an official rebrand.
Sure but that would change as part of this I think.
Maybe in the long run; but in the short term I don’t think it’s possible to create any bootc-artifacts as part of the Fedora composes; I’ve looked into it a bit and I’ll be talking with some people about it in the near future too but for now: not yet, there are a few infrastructural changes necessary to make this possible AFAIK and no one has propose them yet
The “atomic” name has a long history in the Fedora ecosystem, dating back to Red Hat Atomic and Fedora Atomic Workstation (which became Silverblue). It has always implied a read-only rootfs and transactional system updates even though the technologies backing those features have evolved over time.
Whatever name is ultimately chosen should reflect the user-facing experience, not the implementation details. MacOS didn’t change its name even when it introduced atomic, signed, system updates using APFS snapshots because that’s just an implementation detail, not a core part of the MacOS brand.
It is also the plan that all Fedora Atomic Desktops become fully bootable container based in the future. We have a roadmap and we are (slowly but surely) making progress towards that.
