I am not sure I would call it a knockoff…
But to answer your question, usability is much better on Aurora than, for example, Kinoite(Fedora Atomic KDE).
To be more specific, here are some examples:
- Integration of homebrew and distrobox in the base image
- The addition of
ujustwhich is a CLI tool that automates common tasks and makes things easier - When you open a terminal you get a description of how to use brew and ujust making onboarding easier
- The base image includes more drivers including an image with NVIDIA drivers
- The flatpak experience is based on flathub alone simplifying installing applications and avoiding conflicts
- Updates are fully automated by default including the OS, flatpaks and homebrew
- The app store is better laid out and curated in a useful way
- ZFS support
- It isn’t an in your face gaming distro but it includes a lot built-in support for gaming to make life easier.
- The system automatically updates to new “major” versions without any user intervention as part of the normal update process
A lot of that could be setup with a base Fedora Atomic spin, but you would need to do a lot more work and in some cases the result would be inferior. In base Fedora you would need to a lot more layering which increases the maintenance burden. Just figuring out how to get media codecs working on Fedora Atomic since the included Firefox is part of the base image can be painful. For the record, I did use Fedora Kinoite for a while on this laptop and while it works, it is a very different user experience despite using the same technology.
None of this is to say that Fedora Atomic is bad but I would absolutely not give a Fedora Atomic spin to a casual user and expect them to be able to use it. The learning curve is much more substantial.