Because when I finish my 10 hour shift, get home from my 2 hour commute, to my 6 year old kid crying because she managed to fuck her Minecraft machine up somehow, I don't want to spend my only free half hour that day trying to work or what she did.

That's not a learning opportunity for her. Even if she had the patience to sit there and watch me try to fix it, she won't r get what I'm doing. And after getting up at 5.30, getting home at 7.30 watch how good I am at not just swearing at the thing instead.

I control a htpc with an Xbox gamepad. Bazzite I don't even think about updates, it just happens instead of saying "should probably update" and unplugging my nose and keyboard from my other PC. Or leaving mouse and keyboard sit on the floor in front of my tv cabinet.

Most handheld suppliers are shipping windows, replacing it with an immutable system is definitely the way to go. On screen keyboards are play I guess, but even my experience just doing a regular distro on a tablet it was a hassle.

Look, I'm not going into detail on this anymore. But I want to say I'm surprised by how much people are pushing back. "Oh instead of using bazzite, you could setup rsync to do an a/b switch with your server if something goes wrong". (Elsewhere in these comments).

I just didn't think it would be so much for people to accept there are use cases for why people do things differently to them.

easily solved by not giving them root access.

Root vs non-root is, in a nutshell, a tangled mess with millions of opportunities for "oops, didn't think of that" situations: https://www.cve.org/downloads

Immutable keeps the legacy system confituration basically unchanged, but also restores it "from ROM" every time you power on. (not real ROM, but effectively.) In an immutable system, the attack surface is dramatically reduced, and much more diverse among systems than with a mutable OS.

I still miss the advantages for these cases.

Zero-maintenance and upgrades.

Update it every once in a while or setup auto updates. I do not see any difference between traditional os and immutable. You’re likely not modifying any system files anyway.

You're overthinking it, there's no reason to care if the root disk is readable or not. If it updates reliably out of the box there's no reason to touch it.

Are they really going to brick their system? That would require opening the terminal. But I mean, fair.

You don't need to open a terminal to brick a traditional linux system they tend to do that on their own.

What I do not understand is why there are users swearing by bazzite and other immutable distributions. These examples you make is basically for users who just do the most basic operations with their systems.

I can't speak for "immutable distributions" but for bazzite it's to ensure working upgrades.

What I do not understand is why technically adept people are so excited for these kinds of distributions?

I'm technically adept at Linux I expect software to work. (system upgrades should work, app installation shouldn't break the PC, etc.)

It’s the kind of thing they should have developed to release-ready state 20 years ago -

That did happen btw! The project is called the android open source project

The real problem is config drift. You have to maintain a lot of little fixes over time as you operate vanilla Linux. I've run fedora atomic (and rebased to bazzite when it got fairly big) since it launched years ago with only one relatively minor hiccup that was resolved by a single line in terminal (rpm-ostree rebase). You can layer stuff over it to modify the base image and clear it if something breaks, whereas manually removing critical packages and being sure to clear every file would be a nightmare on any other distro. It's an extremely hands off experience that works just like git does and is very bullet proof and reproducible.

I like putting it on old people's computers. It's perfect for a seamless experience.

Yeah, a file system snapshot is another way of achieving safe upgrades. There are upsides and downsides of all approaches though.

Rolling back to a btrfs snapshot might be harder than just picking the other ostree image in GRUB. And you still have the problem where old binaries might be running when only the new binaries/libraries exist on disk. But it also saves space on disk compared to an immutable distro, and it’s much easier to make changes to system files. Every approach is a compromise.

It’s cause of the way an immutable system works. In an immutable system, the entire system is an image. Two are stored on disk. One is active, and the other is usually the previous image. When you update, it overwrites the old image. The current image stays untouched. It’s only once the new image is completely written to disk that it’s marked as the current image.

Package managers are working on the currently running system. They write over the only set of system files, and they can only do that one file at a time, so you can rely on the file system’s journal to make sure each file is correctly written, but there’s nothing preventing the system from being only half updated. If a package relies on a package that hasn’t been installed yet, and the update fails before it gets installed, that package is broken.

In a system like Ubuntu or Fedora, that’s mostly ok, because packages are always built for the kernel and library versions available throughout the lifecycle of the release. So a half updated system is probably fine and will continue the update when rebooted. But for rolling releases like Arch, or for a release upgrade like Ubuntu 25.10 to Ubuntu 26.04, a failed update might mean a broken system.

Immutable means: every time you power it on, it's the same.

So, if you get infected by a virus, power cycle and it's like it never happened.

That, like everything you read on the internet, is a gross oversimplification, caveats apply, etc. etc. but for the most part, that's what immutable means: the running system has no ability to persist changes (except in very specific, controlled, secure, easier to protect circumstances...)

iOS is a walled garden because they do everything they can to block third party app stores, and the "activation" process allows Apple to remotely brick your phone at any time. Immutable Linux distros don't have these issues.

It's better to think about it as though you are making a queue of changes that need approval to be permanent. Rather than just accepting that you just installed a ton of dependencies for no reason because you didn't really want the software, you can cleanly reverse any of the changes.

In a sense, it accomplishes a similar thing as nix in a different way.