I am sorry, mister/miss. Something weird happened to my Lemmy account and it was inaccessible for 2 days.
I’m still very much interested in how you think ‘immutable’ distros should be understood and used.
Immutable distros are good for cases when the machine is meant to be used for very specific tasks and applications while maintaining extreme stability and ease of updating. This includes OSes for ATMs, machinery control panels, enterprise office computers with very strict policies, educational computer class devices. I am not sure whether they are good for critical infrastructure such as aerospace industry and on-board computers so I can’t comment on that and it’s too early to do so anyways. Immutable systems can also be used for regular modern workspaces if stability (and possibly security) are preferred over absolutely everything else.
If I understood you correctly, you don’t regard NixOS as an ‘immutable’ distro (or at least not representative), would you be so kind to elaborate on this?
For me an “immutable distro” is defined more by its read-only (or R/W with write being disabled by default) root file system than by reproducibility or any other stuff. Afaik NixOS does not use any form of read-only FS so that’s why it is not an immutable distro to me.
To be absolutely clear, these notions are (almost) alien to me. I’ve only come across these with new users that had fallen for the (infamous) XY problem. But that’s not even remotely representative. Hence, would I be correct to assume that your understanding of ‘immutable’ distros is relatively shallow? Which, to be absolutely fair, is totally fine.
No matter how good your distro is, there always will be new users that need fixes or customizations that require extra steps and research on immutable (as in my definition) distros. This increases the chance of them giving up on Linux or creating angry/toxic posts on Linux related websites and communities.
Hence, could you perhaps elaborate on what you mean with “disable immutability”.
“Disable immutability” means “allow persistent changes for files and directories located in specific directories that are not in the /home directory/partition (“read-only” directories)”.