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

[Chris Irwin]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2026 at 09:55:04PM -0600, Ron Singh wrote:
>You know, seeing this discussion, I need to go watch your presentation. I
>see your point on atomic vs immutable and yeah, so many folks are referring
>to Atomic offerings as "immutable"...Fedora.
>
>I have a case where a true immutable OS with a thin desktop(Xfce/Mate/LXDE)
>would be cool to try out.

I don't know if you're going to find any user-oriented immutable 
distros.

It's more a thing for containers and VMs, as the compatibility surface 
is so much smaller. But for a laptop, you may still need to add a driver 
(nvidia, or some weird wifi).

It seems that Atomic distros are your most likely option there.

I remember in school, the computers basically did a restore of Windows 
98 on reboot. So every time the machine rebooted, it was in a fresh, 
clean state. It didn't take long, so it must have set up some sort of 
overlay drive for writes (or something like that), rather than rewriting 
the boot drive. I didn't know enough to investigate it at the time.

-- 
Chris Irwin

email:   chris at chrisirwin.ca
   web: https://chrisirwin.ca