this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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You're correct. But, and here's the big but, the whole immutability-thing isn't something the user should be worried about at all.
On Android for example, the system is read-only too, and pretty much nobody cares too, because it was always designed this way and it doesn't inhibit functionality.
It is mainly a big pro for developers in how I see it. See, every installation creates some package drift. One dependency here, one extra program there, no problem.
But in sum, there will accumulate hundreds of "bloat"-packages over the years, which add many unknown vulnerabilities and bugs that are completely individual to your setup.
And then it will begin: a program crashes here, there's your black screen, and every dev on the issue report says " closed, can't replicate". And after an OS-reinstall, it works again.
And if you want to install KDE on Pop!OS for example, it is highly individual and there are still some packages you didn't see, and it will be very buggy. Some buttons that are misalligned, misconfigured drivers, and so on.
I tried changing the DE on my normal Fedora one time and even though I thought I did everything correct, I had to reinstall due to screen tearing/ flickering, many misconfigurations, and so on.
On Silverblue, it's a process of 5 minutes max, and then my setup will be the same as the one from thousand other people.
Ah but on Android they have very rigid rules about partition size, and lots of specialized partitions.
Speaking of which, do you happen to know how immutability is achieved on these Linux distros? Do they mark the system partition read-only, or do they use cgroups, or is it an intrinsic property of the layers?
Package confusions like you describe are always the mark of a poorly designed package system. deb and rpm are positively ancient. deb distros are notorious for multi-repo hell because each repo only has its own limited dependency scope.
You should not have issues like you described on any sane distro. A package is either in a meta package or not. Dependencies should be clear and if something was not explicitly installed it should be cleared out when the thing that depended on it was uninstalled.