Linux

I've been using Kinoite for a couple of years now on my Thinkpad. What would you like to know?

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.

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.