What’s the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
What’s the difference? No matter how hard I look, most of their websites just consist of them advertising that they are immutable.
Okay, I get what an immutable distro is. I get it’s advantages in security/safety. But can someone please explain why this matters? Like, how much safer is this really? I don’t understand the cost/benefit ratio of having an immutable core, especially since compromising the core will probably require fully compromising one or more privileged processes first, at which point it would be game over for a mutable distro as well.
I think the biggest advantage for my use case is the no fuzz aspect. In the rare case something goes wrong I can reboot and select the previous version that worked without a problem. Also the ease of mind knowing I can’t really fuck up my machine, as the important parts are immutable. Other than that I enjoy having everything gaming related already configured correctly as I use bazzite - but that’s probably also true for non immutable gaming oriented distros.
Honestly, that’s the same thing I got with BTRFS+snapper. It creates a snapshot before and after any Package installation. In case anything goes wrong I can just go back to a previous snapshot. And on top of that I can easily install native packages and don’t lose any disk space to multiple partitions.
I’ve come to despise immutable operating systems since first encountering them in Android.
How would you fuck up your machine by installing packages? Hell, get a reasonable package manager and package installation frontend (and a reasonable brain between your ears if that’s the problem). I can’t see how anyone might get their machines into an useless or unbootable state considering that any useful package manager (even minimalist ones like aptitude or blank apt-get) will inform you what it’s going to install and unistall. If I see, that my choice is going to remove the complete DIE I am using plus X, or even GRUB, I lknow there’s something wrong with my selection and abort.
“Yes, do as I say”
A power outage during install.
Trying out experimental stuff.
Uninstalling critical packages.
Someone at $distribution fucked up packaging.
You could just as well ask why an immutable system must be immutable. The safeguards are not there for normal operation. They are supposed to help you with fatal irregularities.
☝🏻People like this fucking nerd are why Linux gets a bad name.