I’ve heard of immutable OS’s like Fedora Silverblue. As far as I understand it, this means that “system files” are read-only, and that this is more secure.
What I struggle to understand is, what does that mean in practical terms? How does installing packages or configuring software work, if system files can’t be changed?
Another thing I don’t really understand is what the benefits as an end user? What kinds of things can I do (or can be done by malware or someone else) to my Arch system that couldn’t be done on an immutable system? I get that there’s a security benefit just in that malware can’t change system files – but that is achieved by proper permission management on traditional systems too.
And I understand the benefit of something declarative like NixOS or Guix, which are also immutable. But a lot of OS’s seem to be immutable but not purely declarative. I’m struggling to understand why that’s useful.
To my understanding, it basically means that you get your software only in containerized format, so no
dnf install. Instead, you can get Appimages/Flatpaks.When you update the system, it will only happen on restart, like Windows. You can’t touch some parts that are more important to the system, like Windows System32 folder.
The benefit is to protect users from themselves. It will be very hard to break something not on-purpose.