I see many people here wondering, why they should consider an immutable system.
As someone, who thought the same a few months ago, and now chose Silverblue, here are reasons why:
- Atomic updates: never worry about half applied installations anymore. Either your OS updates successfully, or it will just work like before.
- Less bugs and better security: every install is the same, so devs can fix one bug or exploit, recreatable on every system.
- Automatic updates (configurable): they get downloaded by the way, without you noticing. And if you reboot anyway, you boot into your updated OS. No waiting times. The system manages itself.
- Way harder to break
- Changes are easily undoable: if an update breaks anything, you can just select another image and reboot, without recovering anything.
- No junk accumulation over time, the OS is kept clean
- Clear distinction between "your" stuff and the OS
- You can "swap out" the base OS cleanly and keep your stuff. Want KDE? No need to reinstall, just paste one command and delete everything Gnome-related, and you are now on Kinoite.
- Flexibility: choose between dozens of different images, like one that replicates SteamOS or Ubuntu, has the MS Surface kernel build in, offers Hyprland, and so on...
- And much more!
My #1 reason is, that everything is worry free.
Those advantages above don't apply to "normal" OSs, even, if I keep everything in Distrobox and Flatpaks.
Immutable OSs aren't called "The future of Linux" without reason. They usually shouldn't impair anyone, and make the whole Linux ecosystem better in any aspect.