Every immutable distro right now

I see lots of people recommending immutable distros to new users as if they are able to debug the inevitable breakages that occur or difficulty installing external programs.
- This goes right with recommending Mint for gaming where Wayland is experimental and everything else is behind by several versions.
  
  I'd say Mint is fine for gaming, as long as your hardware is supported. I'm using it with an Nvidia GPU on X11 and I can play all the games I want to play (Steam is Steam after all). My main gripe is that multi-monitor VRR doesn't work on X11, but it hasn't pushed me to another distro just yet...
  For people/beginners that mostly want to game on a computer, I'd say that actually something "immutable" like Bazzite might be one of the best options.
  
  Is Wayland better for gaming than X?
- Yeah this I don't understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It's usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro's docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that's already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.

NixOS is the new “I use arch btw.”
- Well, it is pretty nice ..
- I use both, btw.

Guix System is wildly different

Some use an A/B system like Android. Others use more complex systems with image trees.
Package managers differ and also ways you can customize the images before/after downloading.
uBlue for example is heavily based on cloud technology and make building custom images with additional packages very easy.
BlendOS downloads packages and builds an image locally, making it easier to customize.
Others I haven't looked at as close, but I'm sure there are plenty of differences
- That's the problem
  Why do I need someone on Lemmy to tell me this when they have a whole 10 or so page website that could just as well detail this instead of the usual „Hey, your keyboard works on this distro”?
  
  I suppose most of the website is about the difference from traditional distros rather than the difference from other immutables. Still, maybe you have a point. Go and submit a pull request to some of those websites! Write a good website inclusion in a feedback form! Join a team and help them out!
  
  most websites are made for distributing ads, I don't really browse much since most of it is generated by ai anyway
  the real useful information can be found on forums or websites like lemmy

Okay, I get what an immutable distro is. I get it's advantages in security/safety. But can someone please explain why this matters? Like, how much safer is this really? I don't understand the cost/benefit ratio of having an immutable core, especially since compromising the core will probably require fully compromising one or more privileged processes first, at which point it would be game over for a mutable distro as well.
- I think the biggest advantage for my use case is the no fuzz aspect. In the rare case something goes wrong I can reboot and select the previous version that worked without a problem. Also the ease of mind knowing I can't really fuck up my machine, as the important parts are immutable. Other than that I enjoy having everything gaming related already configured correctly as I use bazzite - but that's probably also true for non immutable gaming oriented distros.
  
  Honestly, that's the same thing I got with BTRFS+snapper. It creates a snapshot before and after any Package installation. In case anything goes wrong I can just go back to a previous snapshot. And on top of that I can easily install native packages and don't lose any disk space to multiple partitions.
  I've come to despise immutable operating systems since first encountering them in Android.
  
  Finally! Thank you. Makes lots of sense. I've fucked up at least two systems in my life by messing with drivers/settings when I didn't know what I was doing. That would have certainly helped. I'll have to check it bazzite. I game too through Steam/Proton and it's not exactly a 100% match in terms of performance when compared to Windows.
- It’s mostly useful for stability in appliances and reproducibility in large scale deployments.
  IMO, I don’t think immutability makes sense for desktop use. The whole point of a desktop is to make it personalized.
  
  You can do tons of personalization on immutable distros. It just doesn't work the way you're used to. I use Aurora and it's an excellent tinkerer's OS.
- Preventing supply chain attacks for one.

Nix os is on the fence tho. It is immutable, but got hot reload so...
- It's not just debatable, it's beside the point. NixOS is declarative, trivially reproducible and natively container-ready, that's what makes it so great.
  
  Until you realise that you need to learn a whole programming language to run one executable outside of the package repos
  I do respect nix, but it ain't for me
  
  Noob question for you: what does "trivially reproducable" mean?
- Nix's 'immutability' is, as I understand it, quite a different idea to the others.

I just don't get the hype of immutable. Sure, it's not easy to break and can be better for security, but it really does defeat the purpose of Linux freedom. It's only really good for absolute and total beginners (meaning those who aren't tech savvy), and for home console style PCs.
- I would argue it’s the opposite of being good with beginners. Having used many distros for years, with most of my time spent in Arch and NixOS, nix basically follows zero Linux conventions and requires you to learn a new language, learn the conventions of the nix community and ecosystem (channels vs flakes, home manager, etc)
  I primarily use nix but it’s specifically because I can write nix files and use them anywhere, so I’m a hobbyist, not a beginner
  Mint is good for total beginners. Arch is good for those that really want to learn how Linux works. Nix is for those that want a reproducible system, not beginners
  
  Nix is quite a different experience to the other immutable distros though.
- You still have freedom. Putting "read only" on some files isn't taking away fundamental freedom, it's a design choice. You can still meddle with it if you go further up the chain (e.g. make your own OS fork), just like you can meddle with your normal, pre-packaged Linux kernel if you want to compile it yourself.
  I think even the most power of power users could appreciate an immutable distro in the right situation: if it's the right fit and you don't need to tweak those details, immutability gives you some technical benefits as a trade-off.
- I personally just don't want to mess with "the core" of my PC
  I like to install a lot of stuff from all around, and usually they all have these different dependencies that I might have to install separately... I use immutable because I want to know that I can purge any of that stuff easily without messing with anything else, because it's all separated from each other.
  An example on the windows side is a Tetramino stacking game called "DTET". It's so old that I had to install some runtime from Visual Basic 6 to run it. When I no longer need DTET, am I going to remember to remove it?
  With immutable, I can just nuke whatever container I installed the program in if need be.