How zero-maintenance is Fedora Atomic?

I’m specifically asking about upgrade impacts (e.g. from 43 to 44).

From my understanding, when rebasing to a new release, all packages get replaced by new ones, orphaned packages are automatically removed since it’s a completely new image being downloaded and the new defaults are automatically set (besides filesystem/partitions changes).

My question is, does anything else stays in the system from the old version? I’m asking specifically about files in /etc and other places where system files live. Thanks for your time and any answers!

/etc isn’t completely fresh, it will carry old data around. See: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/08/25/what-image-mode-3-way-merge#where_does__etc_live_

I find it to be very low maintenance. I don’t even see updates, I have them set up to all happen in the background.

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In addition to what is described in the article linked in the previous post, /usr/local is also local state. You can check this with ls -l /usr/local or file /usr/local.

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