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?
As far as use cases where immutable distros would be more or less convenient, it appears to me that due to the security and reproducibility factors, immutable distros are better for server or enterprise environments where updates need to be rolled out quickly and smoothly, which are most actual Linux systems out there and where Linux companies make their money (hence why they seem like the hot new thing right now), and for desktops where people are primarily concerned with not wanting to “break” anything. But a classical distro, IMO, would be better for folks like me who do want the control to change or customize things down to the core parts of the OS. As far as I’m aware, you don’t have much freedom to tinker with an immutable distro until it’s wiped away with the next update.
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).