I think immutable OSes serve two purposes: For the developer who needs to operate multiple environments at the same time, and for the utter novice who could screw something up otherwise.

This audience, us, is the exactly middle ground. We like tinkering. We like setting things up.

So, I don’t think immutable OSes are for us.

Edit: Tumbleweed is not immutable, you learn something new every day, especially from your mistakes 🙃 (it's still a really nice distro)

Personally really happy with my choice of ~Immutable~ Distro: OpenSuse Tumbleweed. To me, who is half a year into using linux, its very convenient to use an immutable system as IF i were to do a wrong command or whatever its super easy to rollback the system (at least on Suse as it uses btrfs-filesystem). Another thing worth mentioning which is also why I chose to go with immutable is that it really teaches you "the good standards" of where to tinker with files and where not to, at least for a beginner like myself this is very nice.

I personally don't like them. I just keep my system clean and use distrobox and flatpak

I'm thinking about it as well! I'm on workstation. I'm not sure about the additional benefit for me as a user. Or let's say for a newbie, should I recommend the immutable version?

There are many good comments here and from what I've read immutable seems best suited to the Enterprise IT environment where you don't want the user fiddling with the system, and you want built in rollback and quick configuration. As well as user data protection.

But for Linux users at home I don't see any massive advantage. Especially if you're running a reliable distro like Mint or Debian, or better yet Linux Mint Debian Edition is the best of both worlds.

If you only turn the PC on to watch YouTube, read a document, scan and print, surf the web or game your system should be 100% ok. Unless you're running Manjaro or Arch.

What I don't like about the immutable approach is that it turns my PC into a dumb terminal locked by the distro Devs and updated at their will. It's ok if I have read only on my Android phone because I don't need to get into root etc. That's a good place for immutable.

But I don't want my Linux box at home to be a just an appliance that someone else essentially has control over.

That's very much an Apple approach. Don't let the user see or touch anything. They can just be content to change the wallpaper and add a widget. We'll decide when and how the OS gets updated, what apps they can and cannot run etc.

Ultimately it infringes on user freedom and the very FOSS principles that set Linux apart from the rest.

In short, fine for Enterprise IT but no good for the average Linux user.

Eh, I don't do anything illicit on the internet neither work at NASA or any other high-security-related job... so I'm in the "Lol" side of this whole story.

Compile your commands, kids.

This is why fedora had a little bar after rebooting when I updated right? What am I a Windows user?!? This is the extent of my understanding of immutable distros and I am furious with them.

Immutable distros are all about making thing that were easy into complex, “locked down”, “inflexible”, bullshit to justify jobs and payed tech stacks and a soon to be released property solution.

We had Ansible, containers, ZFS and BTRFS that provided all the required immutability needed already but someone decided that is is time to transform proven development techniques in the hopes of eventually selling some orchestration and/or other proprietary repository / platform / BS like Docker / Kubernetes does.

“Oh but there are truly open-source immutable distros” … true, but this hype is much like Docker and it will invariably and inevitably lead people down a path that will then require some proprietary solution or dependency somewhere that is only required because the “new” technology itself alone doesn’t deliver as others did in the past.

As with CentOS’s fiasco or Docker it doesn’t really matter if there are truly open-source and open ecosystems of immutable distributions because in the end people/companies will pick the proprietary / closed option just because “it’s easier to use” or some other specific thing that will be good on the short term and very bad on the long term. This happened with CentOS vs Debian is currently unfolding with Docker vs LXC/RKT and will happen with Ubuntu vs Debian for all those who moved from CentOS to Ubuntu.

We had good examples of immutable distributions and architectures before as any MIPS router and/or IOT device is usually immutable and there are also reasons why people are moving away from those towards more mutable ARM architectures.