So "Cloud Native" speaks to multiple aspects of how universal-blue is both built, distributed, and some of the guiding principals behind the project.

I'll start at the very basics, where we define "Cloud Native":
Cloud native is the software approach of building, deploying, and managing modern applications in cloud computing environments.

I'll get a little hand wavy here as our desktops/laptops aren't typically defined as a "cloud" (read: grouping of machines, typically behind an API that someone else manages but makes available to users or customers). However - we can look at it as a target platform for deployment. How universal-blue gets there is the real interesting part. That "made by cloud native nerds" is a very compact way of describing how the project is built, tested, and rolled out.

Universal-blue images are all built in CI. In this case - its a combination of base layer components - sometimes built in COPR for some projects that are included in the product operating system, and then those COPR built artifacts are included by a Containerfile. Along with all the goodness contained in SilverBlue (fedora rpm artifacts).

That containerfile is built, tested, and signed in GitHub actions, and a manifest is then updated (somewhere, i don't actually know where ublue looks for these manifests to identify it has an update - it might just be the GHCR registry - but don't hold me to that).

Now this probably all sounds like something you see in your day to day if you work in infrastructure, or in a company producing software/services for the web. But what's really unique from a consumed operating system perspective is that those builds and tests effectively gatekeep the "blessed" configuration for universal-blue. Classically you have kernel modules that get built on your machine using a technique known as DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module System). Every update to the kernel you have to re-build some library as part of the update process. And if your particular version of a module hasn't been vetted with what kernel you just pulled you can be left in a rather bad state - I've had this happen to me with the proprietary nvidia drivers as an example.

How ublue delivers these modules is part of that not-so-secret sauce that makes it wonderful. These modules are built in the cloud in that same release pipeline, and if they fail - they don't get released! You simply don't see an update for that day, and things hum along just fine. This breaking happening somewhere other than your computer is part of that reliability promise - you wont be dealing with kernel module breakage, the release maintainers will have to resolve the break (or communicate with upstream to find a solution) so your incoming stream of updates can be unblocked.

Finally - there are a lot of "patterns" - or process to achieve a desired outcome, that has been piloted in the Cloud Native world. Someone mentioned CloudNative makes them think of CoreOS. I'm glad you brought this up - If you keep your older versions (by pinning, or ublue keeps the last known booted image by default, and you can change this to keep say 10 if you wanted) - you can always roll back to the version that worked before you encountered a fault. This same pattern exists in the base-line SilverBlue distribution.

This is not an exhaustive analysis but I've already penned a good novel here. I hope this helps outline how universal-blue brings Cloud Native to the desktop. I encourage you to kick the tires and try it out, even if only in a virtual machine.