Is there debian based immutable distro?

I really appreciate rarely seeing the message "update complete, please reboot now". I would consider myself on the tech savvy side though.

I'm not really sure how the upsides of immutable distros work. I've been using linux for a long time and I'm not an expert but I've learned bits of things here and there.

I recently bought a steamdeck and it's running an immutable distro. I don't really know how to use software that's installed via flatpak because it's weird.

I have a game installed that runs badly (unplayable for me) through proton. I can launch it through q4wine if I switch the steamdeck into "desktop mode" and it runs much better.

If it wasn't an immutable distro I could pretty easily make a shell script that launches the game through wine. Then I could add that shell script as a non steam game and it would (I think) run well, and I'd be able to launch it from the non desktop side of steam OS that is a lot more streamlined.

There is something comforting to me about immutable distros though.

I feel like I don't remember half the shit I have installed on my computers. If I wanted to start cutting things out I don't know where I'd start. But with flatpaks I get the sense I could probably just wipe anything I don't use out of the flatpak directory and I probably wouldn't break anything.

I'm much more comfortable trying things that I'm not sure will (or expect not to) work. I can just blast the toolbox or whatever afterwards.

Compare to some of my earlier forays into Linux, where I'd do some nonsense and then attempts to remove said nonsense would break some other load-bearing part of the OS.

I used an immutable fedora on my surface pro 4, I wanted to shoot myself in the face every time I had to install anything. I'm good on that for the rest of my natural life.

what does the community think of it?

Everyone has their own opinion, personally I think they're a great idea and have lots of great applications. But just like rolling vs non-rolling release it's a personal and application dependant choice.

Do the downsides outweigh the benefits or vice versa?

Again, depends, for my personal computer I wouldn't use it because I think it could get complicated to get specific things to work, but for closed hardware like the Deck or even a fairly stable desktop used as a gaming system it's perfect.

Could this help Linux reach more mainstream audiences?

It could, it can also hamper it because people might start to try solutions that only work until next boot and not understanding why, or having problems getting some special hardware to work (more than it would be a mutable distro). But there is a great counter to this which is that once it's running it will be very difficult to break by user error.

At the end of the day I think it's a cool technology but that people should know what they're getting into, just like when choosing rolling vs non-rolling distro, it's not about what's better, but what suits your needs best.

Since the idea is that the "root partition" is immutable, serious question:

How do you fix a hardware config issue or a distro packaging / provision issue in an immutable distro?

Several times in my Linux history I've found that, for example, I need to remove package-provided files from the ALSA files in /usr/share/alsa in order for the setup to work with my particular chipset (which has a hardware bug). Other times, I've found that even if I set up a custom .XCompose file in my $HOME, some applications insist on reading the Compose files in /usr/share/X11/locale instead, which means I need to be able to edit or remove those files. In order to add custom themes, I need to be able to add them to /usr/share/{icons,themes}, since replicating those themes for each $HOME in the system is a notorious waste of space and not all applications seem to respect /usr/local/share. Etc.

Unless I'm mistaken on how immutable systems work, I'm not sure immutable systems are really useful to someone who actually wants to or needs to power user Linux, or customize past the "branding locking" that environments like Gnome have been aiming for for like a decade.

Has anyone had good success with setting up a development environment in an immutable distro? I love the entire concept because it fits with a lot of my other software preferences, but the tools for containerized dev environments felt frustrating.

Like, what do you do for your editor? vscode + devcontainers feel like the best option, but it's rough when I need other IDEs (like I use some of the Jetbrains products). Stuff like toolbox works well too, but to get an editor in that, you have to install it in each one, or make a container that has it built in.

Otherwise, I'll stick with plain Fedora — I use flatpaks for all of my apps anyways (except my editor)

From an advertising perspective, it's important to think about who you're targeting. Who are your likely customers? Certainly there are some based on the strengths that you raised.

However, some people are definitely not a good target audience, and some people is actually a very large group of people. There are a lot of current and potential users who essentially want the standard major applications to work, and they're not going to touch the root partition, and they want things to be very simple. For people like that, Debian or Ubuntu or Fedora already do what they want. And these major operating systems have been around for so long that people will naturally be more confident using them, because they were their friends have experience, or because they think the organization has more stability because of its experience.

Of course a lot of things depend on how you define words, but to me the above paragraph describes the mainstream audience, and I don't think you're going to have much luck reaching them, because I don't think the thing you're trying to sell gives them extra value. In other words, it's not solving a problem for them, so why should they care.

The root filesystem is being read from somewhere, and if it's being read from, it can be written to. Having an extra step or two in the way doesn't make it "extremely secure".