I recently took up Bazzite from mint and I love it! After using it for a few days I found out it was an immutable distro, after looking into what that is I thought it was a great idea. I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update, I think for businesses/ less tech savvy people it adds another layer of protection from self harm because you can’t mess with the root without extra steps.
For anyone who isn’t familiar with immutable distros I attached a picture of mutable vs immutable, I don’t want to describe it because I am still learning.
My question is: what does the community think of it?
Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?
Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?
Any other input would be appreciated!
It can be made to be by pinning various things which are not by default.
What things?
At the surface, you can pin the commit you pull packages from, but if you want to go deeper, you can essentially define your own channel and dependent binaries, allowing you to store every aspect of how a generation is built.
Yes, or use flakes which gives you a lockfile pinning everything. But this is related to reproducibility, not immutability.
If you control everything in the build it is, and every generation is immutable.
Isn’t immutability related to the root filesystem being read-only? I can write on my root filesystem, even if it’s mostly links to the store I can replace those links.
I guess that’s true, tbh the reproducibility aspect is really what I like about nix, and I guess I’m confusing a bit here. I guess I’m saying nix gives a good compromise with immutable generations and high repro, but you’ve convinced me it’s not immutable per-se.
Well in the end I think I’m needlessly nitpicking. It doesn’t matter if it’s strictly immutable or not. What matter is that it has the good parts of reproducibility, immutability and declarativity.