this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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The important parts of the filesystem are mounted read-only so you'd have to explicitly reboot and mount as read-write. That's a lot different than marking individual files or folders as read-only which is what you're referring to.
Yes and no. To get the same behavior without an immutable OS you'd need to take a snapshot before every update and update every package on the system every time and install no additional packages.
I'm guessing you mean "stock" as in never installing anything additional. If using the base packaging system is your jam then absolutely you shouldn't use an immutable OS. There are plenty of alternatives to doing a
apt install
and that's what you're encouraged to do because those options don't usually involve writing to important system dirs.I can't say I've ever run into two packages that, in effect, conflicted with each other, but I've absolutely seen packages conflict during installation where I was forced to look for an alternative package without a conflict or complie from source.
Saying, "Look at what you can't do!" is usually not a good idea but depending on your priorities and skill level it's really about taking riskier options off the table. Yes, some things are more challenging using containers but the likelihood of a container making your machine unbootable is practically zero. I've run and administered Linux machines (personally) for over 20 years and not working about base packages has frankly been a load off my mind. And because I'm doing more things in containers I'm coming up with solutions I can easily port to any machine.
I would never say immutables are better than standard distros but I don't think it's fair to say they don't provide any advantages or that you can get the same benefits simply by changing your habits.