You seem really angry about a concept you clearly do not actually understand.

Pretty strong and judgemental opinions. Also incorrect 😀

Immutable distros are great for the overwhelming majority of all computer users. Most people want a computer that lets them web browser, game, consume media, and do application based productivity like editing (documents, photos, illustrations, video, etc.). In fact, that was too generous of a description because most people just consume content.

If your distro requires cli for regular usage and requires manual maintenance, it's only suitable for computer adepts, which is a small minority of all computer users. You are not the average computer user. No one on this site is. If you can't see that then you aren't in touch with reality.

Just to be very clear: the name "immutable distro" is unfortunately a misnomer. In practice, the restrictions found on so-called "immutable" atomic distros are very tame.

For example, on Fedora Atomic^[The atomic distro I'm most familiar with.], it's mostly a paradigm shift. That is, you can achieve (almost) everything that you can on a traditional distro, the only difference being how.

So, if we would take OP's query as an example, they are not able to do sudo dnf install vim btop. Instead^[Knowing that they're on Bluefin, a derivative.], they have to do brew install vim btop. Additionally, these changes persist, as you'd expect. Please note that this is just one of the ways/methods you can achieve this on Bluefin (and other Fedora Atomic derivatives). Other methods include:

• Install within a distrobox and export it.
• Simply layer it.
• Make a custom image that installs these by default and switch to said custom image.
• Install as a sysext.

As you'd expect, each one of these comes with its own set of tradeoffs.

To be honest. Immutable distros are not for everyone. Tinkerers especially would not be suited to use them, because of all the "restrictions" in place.

Better to find another distro in that case.