For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?
NixOS/Guix still give users the control to change anything at any time. That’s because they aren’t image based and instead they achieve immutability with the Nix package manager (symlinks and a declarative system configuration file).
I agree with immutable OS on servers being great, but I also believe immutable systems are a good choice for desktops. Especially managed desktops (eg. my moms) work well with an image-based OS. Flatpak is often enough for those few gui apps and there’s less risk of automatic updates failing (eg. pulling power plug while updating).