Nope.

Hate to keep litigating this around here, but the shift alone is enough. Explaining to people WTF an immutable filesystem is, is a sure way to frustrate them into giving up, despite whatever comms finesse you might THINK you have.

Counterpoint: STOP SUGGESTING IMMUTABLE DISTROS TO NEW USERS

For people who just want a functional OS, they don't want to have to think about new rules. They need a quick off-ramp from Windows that acts as they expect.

Package management is already enough of a mindfuck for people switching, then you're throwing in containers, permissions, flatpak vs native packages, what sandboxing is, why your browser likely can't just upload a simple fucking file, and why your camera doesn't work on Zoom, because you have a meeting in 10 minutes.

Unless you are handing people something akin to a mobile OS with everything all inclusive and configured so EVERYTHING works off the bat, you're doing such a huge disservice to people switching over to an immutable distro, and there is ZERO benefit, but all kinds of added frustration.

You need to stop, and I yield my time.

It's not a hot take, but it only applies to specific type of newbies who want to keep using Linux like they use windows, because a newbie will stay a newbie on an atomic system. Those who actually wanna dwell into Linux and take full advantages of things like customizing & scripting, will feel restrained. But then again, only a newbie could really tell if that's the case.

The main problem is when following instructions for command line tools. They might figure out how to use dnf instead of apt, but the extra layers required for ostree are not very friendly. There are a ton of potential frustrations in this area, especially with GPU stuff or hobbyist hardware like Arduino where kernel stuff is needed in userland. At least as of nearly 3 years ago, the documentation in this area sucks. I was on Silverblue for a few years and managed to get through the frustrations due to intermediate experience level. I found toolbox useless compared to distrobox. But using this with something like Arduino was annoying at best. The needed dependencies expected by whatever stuff I wanted to install was usually a big mystery with near useless error failure messages and names of packages and libraries totally unrelated to the package naming in DNF. When updating the base OS, stuff built in these containers is totally useless because I could not update the containers to the new OS image. Playing around with Flash Forth on a microcontroller was even worse. I ended up layering a bunch of stuff on the host because the containers were just not working. When I got an Nvidia machine, I went to Fedora Workstation and have had far fewer issues and frustrations. SB wasn't bad, but it is a pain to use these if you need kernel level access. Just my $0.02. I was actually on SB for ~2-3 years.

How about "no".

Anyone completely switching off windows needs a bulletproof system

A solid 90 percent of home users just need a browser, email, and access to some kind of app store or repository where they can click on the big colourful icon and get a program they want.

Any modern distro can provide that, it doesn't have to be the particular one that you've got an obsession about.

Yes. Make SSDs wear down even faster with immutable systems, rolling releases and Flatpak.

I started with Ubuntu and then Mint, I don't think the system files being modifiable is a huge issue, I don't think many noobs are really doing much to mess with them. If you're just looking for something that does your basic everyday things then its just installing the OS and then putting your apps on there.

Tbh everything that makes those systems good for noobs works on other systems. Flatpak, distrobox, homebrew and btrfs snapshots.

The immutable OS part is actually just optional lol

As someone who's had several people in my life make the switch, you're just wrong.

Users are going to need to tweak and modify system files. You can say as much as you want that they "shouldn't", but at the end of the day they may have to tweak something because they have exotic hardware or want to run a specific app.

And the benefit isn't really that great, imo. A random user isn't going to go poking around /etc and modify files randomly. And if they do, something like timeshift will save them.

My go to recommendation is Mint. When things go wrong or the user needs to do something complex, there are a lot of guides out there for Ubuntu which also work for Mint.

NixOS. It is like atomic, but more flexible.

Atomic systems are terrible for people that want to do something besides basic stuff.

My buddy tried bazzite twice and swapped back because he couldn't manage to install modded games, emulators and the like. All the guides were for normal installs, not the fancy atomic bullshit. He even managed to break it twice, idk how. I think it's related to a KDE plugin for wallpapers but I'm not sure. In any case, bulletproof my ass.

Ok, hot take: Piefed, or Lemmy, needs an extension which multiplies þe vote count on communities like þis by -1, because nobody knows how it is supposed to work.

Am I þe only person who reads sidebars?