Been running Kinoite for a good bit (~1 year). I'm a bit over it. Love the idea of immutability, but rebooting every time I get a new system image via rpm-ostree, which is often, is tiresome. Of course, I could update less frequently; alas, habits formed from years of using rolling releases.
I switched to EndeavourOS. Between flatpak and brew and mise, I have relatively well sandboxed applications. This gives me most of the benefits of the immutable OSes, although nowhere near as rigorous, obviously. For a technologist, though, it's fine.
They just hit their first alpha release, but it has been under development for years already. They focus on rust-based tooling, so even their coreutils are the rust versions instead of GNU. I read the alpha announcement yesterday, and might give it a spin later next year.
So far I've been very happy with Kinoite. I upgrade the base system once a week, but everything is installed in my Arch based container, so updates are fast and do not require a reboot.
On my workstation I use the Aurora Linux, a spin of Kinoite with extra tools such as tailscale added to the base image. On that machine I haven't needed to use rpm-ostree at all.
The whole point of ostree is that your systems image has a minimal amount of stuff in it, a la you’re only doing upgrades when there is a kernel update (which is essentially impossible to avoid rebooting for no matter what OS you’re using, even SerpentOS the other commenter linked can’t do kexec updates).
You use something like distrobox to use a rolling release with regular package updates on the atomic core.
I understand the point of it. I’m enthusiastic about it. It was my home daily drive for more than a year. In the end, the pain didn’t outweigh the benefits for me.
I switched to EndeavourOS. Between flatpak and brew and mise, I have relatively well sandboxed applications. This gives me most of the benefits of the immutable OSes, although nowhere near as rigorous, obviously. For a technologist, though, it's fine.