[kwlug-disc] Bad review of "immutable" distros

[Doug Moen]

Since this is probably aimed at me, I'll respond.

Most of this article is bullshit. The blogger claims that Fedora Atomic Desktop, which I gave a KWLUG presentation on, is immutable. It is not immutable. A root user can arbitrarily mutate the root file system. The system also does not force you to run all applications in containers. You can install packages into /usr, just as you can in non-atomic Fedora.

During my presentation on Fedora Atomic Desktop, I went to some effort to distinguish immutable operating systems from atomic ones. I explained why I don't want an immutable desktop, but that the atomic transactional updates of Fedora Atomic interest me.

Fedora Atomic Desktop is atomic. This means system updates are applied atomically and transactionally. Ditto for system changes that I perform locally as an administrator.

Atomic update means that you accumulate a set of changes to the base system in a transaction, then you make an explicit gesture to cause those changes to go live. The gesture is either a shell command (rpm-ostree apply-live), or you reboot the system.

The reasons I would give for not recommending Fedora Atomic Desktop to KWLUG members are primarily in the unfamiliarity of the system administration UI, which IMO is less polished than I would like, and introduces some friction. Another issue is that the Fedora RPM repository seems to have significantly fewer packages than the Debian repository which many people here are used to. I'm still running my atomic desktop, but I continue to consider it to be an experiment.

The blogger does give some reasons for not wanting to run an immutable distro, which overlap with my reasons. But he is confused about what "immutable" means. In an immutable distro, it is impossible for a local user with root to make changes to the root file system. This improves security, because if malware attains root, there is far less damage that it can cause. There are actually immutable Linux distros for the server and embedded market. The blogger correctly observes that embedded systems are a good fit for immutable Linux.

Much of this rant is actually an attack on flatpak. I'll note that people use flatpak on every Linux desktop distro, not just the atomic ones. I'm running the KDE variant of Fedora Atomic Desktop (Kinoite), and there were a handful of KDE flatpak apps preinstalled, although nothing that I use. This may have more to do with KDE than it does with Fedora Atomic. Firefox is preinstalled as a regular Fedora package. I do use flatpak when it is the most convenient option for installing a GUI app, and this is unrelated to whether I'm on my Mint system or on my Kinoite system.

On Kinoite, you by default install flatpaks from a Fedora-controlled repository. But flathub is also available as an option, with a little extra work. The difference is that flathub gives upstream developers control over how their software is packaged, while with the Fedora flatpak repository, it is Fedora that is in control. This idiot blogger seems to think that you are forced to install everything from flathub:

> Immutable desktops, however, force you to rely on containerized app stores (Flatpak or Snap). This shifts your trust from a central team to thousands of random, unvetted package maintainers. 

Doug.

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026, at 11:19 AM, William Park via kwlug-disc wrote:
> Since lots of people here are going ga-ga over immutable os...
>> https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20206
>> https://blog.woralelandia.com/ten-1-reasons-to-avoid-the-immutable-desktop-en.html
> 
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