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this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Of course people can have different opinions on this, but the point for me is that I am of the firm belief that immutable is a must for people that just want their OS to work indefinitely without having to take care of that aspect. And once you got that covered, I feel that you need some sort of "App Store" app out of the box where you can get whatever people may need. Ubuntu has Snaps, which to my understanding is just a different take on what Flatpaks are accomplishing.
Currently the Top 5 of the past 6 months on Distrowatch are all mutable, 2 of them are Arch-based, one comes with Xfce. I have been a Mint user myself and again, of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me the ship of using Debian derivatives has sailed, which might also subconsciously be the reason why no Ubuntu-based immutable distro has made it into my experiments. (No disrespect to Canonical and what they have done for the community since 2004, my first ever hands-on with Linux was on their 04.10 release.)
Either way I just can't see myself recommending any of those Top 5 to people who just want to use a PC reliably. And if I'm going to be the one they turn to with their problems I don't want those to potentially be about system-level breakages. When filtering by the "Immutable" tag on Distrowatch it seems that they just bunch those spins into their main distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. I guess you can say VanillaOS is niche in comparison, but Fedora Silverblue is basically an immutable version of a well established distribution with Red Hat backing no less. And once it is set up like my pilot is now it works just fine. I guess the plan now is to keep that installation running and see how it behaves across updates/upgrades and such.
By the way, in my view, Ubuntu using Snaps rather then native packages is a negative.
But we know why Snaps and Flatpaks started existing. I also think they are architecturally ugly.
And I think you have a point in terms of patches potentially coming too slowly onto an immutable system. But that problem isn't an inherent one, it's just a problem if distribution updates are slow because community support is lacking. At which point you're just trying to compare Open Source to Proprietary solutions where support is explicitly paid for. I'll trust a year old Linux kernel over the latest and greatest Windows release any day.
Actually I both do and do not understand why they exist. I use Debian based distros and do not use either well except when I am using Ubuntu which is forcing more and more snaps.
I do actually use exactly one appimage. I use to use the snap but found it was not that stable. One also generally has to have relatively new distro releases too as both flatpack and snap need to be fairly current which can be problem for near EOL Debian stable. Hence neither flatpack nor snap is that portable.
Where flatpacks and snaps look a lot better is smaller distros with smaller repos. Hence, not that interesting for Debian based distros.
I love The Debian Project as an entity and I hope it exists until the end of time. I have this old 2005ish Sony Vaio which was built right at the cusp of the switch to x64 and thanks to Debian (who I believe are the only ones who still do 32 bit builds) I was able to bring my nostalgia for the device into a modern age. But I digress.
I think ultimately we need to find a way to make dependency conflicts a thing of the past. Just install two versions of the same library if 2 of my programs need different ones. Maybe I'm thinking too naively about this and of course this isn't something you could do on an immutable system, but if we're talking Linux as a concept there are definitely some common practices today no one would've even considered 15 years ago. We need to make it irrelevant whether my installer is called pacman, zypper, apt, dnf or what have you. AppImages can give us that freedom and portability right now. Maybe we could combine the convenience of packaged apps with the beauty of centralized package management.
Yes I would disagree regarding immutable. Such a distribution cannot be secure for any lenght of time. Security updates are required. As soon as it customize in any way it is not immutable including adding flatpacks. So I do not see the attraction.