Since the idea is that the “root partition” is immutable, serious question:

How do you fix a hardware config issue or a distro packaging / provision issue in an immutable distro?

Several times in my Linux history I’ve found that, for example, I need to remove package-provided files from the ALSA files in /usr/share/alsa in order for the setup to work with my particular chipset (which has a hardware bug). Other times, I’ve found that even if I set up a custom .XCompose file in my $HOME, some applications insist on reading the Compose files in /usr/share/X11/locale instead, which means I need to be able to edit or remove those files. In order to add custom themes, I need to be able to add them to /usr/share/{icons,themes}, since replicating those themes for each $HOME in the system is a notorious waste of space and not all applications seem to respect /usr/local/share. Etc.

Unless I’m mistaken on how immutable systems work, I’m not sure immutable systems are really useful to someone who actually wants to or needs to power user Linux, or customize past the “branding locking” that environments like Gnome have been aiming for for like a decade.

From an advertising perspective, it’s important to think about who you’re targeting. Who are your likely customers? Certainly there are some based on the strengths that you raised.

However, some people are definitely not a good target audience, and some people is actually a very large group of people. There are a lot of current and potential users who essentially want the standard major applications to work, and they’re not going to touch the root partition, and they want things to be very simple. For people like that, Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora already do what they want. And these major operating systems have been around for so long that people will naturally be more confident using them, because they were their friends have experience, or because they think the organization has more stability because of its experience.

Of course a lot of things depend on how you define words, but to me the above paragraph describes the mainstream audience, and I don’t think you’re going to have much luck reaching them, because I don’t think the thing you’re trying to sell gives them extra value. In other words, it’s not solving a problem for them, so why should they care.

what does the community think of it?

Everyone has their own opinion, personally I think they’re a great idea and have lots of great applications. But just like rolling vs non-rolling release it’s a personal and application dependant choice.

Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?

Again, depends, for my personal computer I wouldn’t use it because I think it could get complicated to get specific things to work, but for closed hardware like the Deck or even a fairly stable desktop used as a gaming system it’s perfect.

Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?

It could, it can also hamper it because people might start to try solutions that only work until next boot and not understanding why, or having problems getting some special hardware to work (more than it would be a mutable distro). But there is a great counter to this which is that once it’s running it will be very difficult to break by user error.

At the end of the day I think it’s a cool technology but that people should know what they’re getting into, just like when choosing rolling vs non-rolling distro, it’s not about what’s better, but what suits your needs best.

The whole point of Linux is to tinker, immutable distros destroy the whole point, not to mention, it’s a very windows-approach

Not to mention there’s no guarantee if security even with Immutable distros

Then you have NixOS, which is declarative, and fairly immutable.

You don’t have to reboot to make changes, but you can’t just run unlinked binaries either.

You can’t do things like edit your hosts table or modify the FS for cron jobs. The application store is unwritable, but you can sync new apps into it .

You have to make changes to the config file and run a rebuild as root.

I’m much more comfortable trying things that I’m not sure will (or expect not to) work. I can just blast the toolbox or whatever afterwards.

Compare to some of my earlier forays into Linux, where I’d do some nonsense and then attempts to remove said nonsense would break some other load-bearing part of the OS.

Bazzite is great. I was using Nobara before it, and Solus before that and Bazzite has been the best experience I ever had on Linux, I don’t plan on changing distros as long as it remains a thing.

I don’t mind flatpaks in a pinch, but having to use them for literally every app on my computer is an unreasonable amount of bloat.

I have investigated the idea and came to the conclusion that immutable distros are essentially a research project. They attempt to advance the state-of-art a slight bit but the cost is currently too great.

Perhaps somebody will some day create something that’s worth switching to. But I don’t think that has happened yet, or is happening with any of the current distros. Silverblue might become that with enough polish, but I feel that to get that amount of polish, they would have to make Silverblue the 1st class citizen, i.e. the default install of Fedora.

I am a huge fan of immutable distributions, not for my personal daily driver but for secondary systems like my living room/home theater PC.

I heard both flatpak and immutability are obstacles to developers. How bad is it really?

I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.

So, you’re saying that immutable is terrible for system uptime.

Could you share some pics (without anything private ofc) of bazzite? I wanted to try it but I couldn’t use it as live distro. My main problem is arch because I’m used to apt and I find pacman or whatever it uses difficult for me (nothing I can’t learn ofc)

I love the idea of getting a fresh image for every update

What do you mean? Thanks

Is there debian based immutable distro?

For my needs, I’ve build a static system with buildroot for a pi zero. No updates, no modifications on the system, no remote access. Some directories are in tempfs, and after a reboot the system is fresh again. when needed, I removed the sd card and copy a new image

I use this board for a pulseaudio/mpd player, it’s not intended for a desktop usage, but I’m happy beiing able to configure a system like this one. For me, there is no maintenance, and this is exactly what I wanted