Been rocking Kinoite for 2 years now - several major Fedora release upgrades, and zero breakage. I do weird stuff in my "pet" containers (using distrobox), and I love how my base system remains indestructible no matter how much I goof around.
Immutable is indeed the future. The moment a user installs something on a traditional mutable OS, it's configuration/environment drifts from the "base", making any system update or application install a potential conflict. After you install something on a traditional mutable OS, there's often no way to get back to the base without a OS reinstall (programs don't clean up after themselves, they change system settings, environment, more/worse).
Immutable operating systems solve this by having an immutable base image. Everyone running, for instance, Kinoite 42.20251011.0 all have exactly the same base. Users then can "layer" applications on top of the base image, sort of like a dockerfile. If something breaks, you just remove that application (layer) and it's like it never happened. Everyone having the same exact base image also means updates can be much more thoroughly tested, and confidently rolled-out to users.
Note, "Immutable" doesn't mean you can't save files or install things - it just means you cannot mutate the base OS image. There's always a "known good configuration" to go back to.
You're also encouraged to use "pet" containers for things like development - where you will install all sorts of weird system packages, libraries, tools, etc. without fear of polluting or breaking your system.
An immutable system + pet containers means your system will always be stable. Really neat.
That sounds great. How well does the base OS + "pet" containers work with all the crazy dependencies you need to do modern ML work, e.g. some exact combination of nvidia drivers + CUDA + torch + other random stuff? That's the pain point I'd be motivated enough to solve that I'd switch distros.
Your "pet" containers basically become your traditional OS, in a way. They use filesystem overlays, so your container can see all of the files on your system, plus it's own layered files, ie. each container has it's own "view" of the filesystem.
You can install anything inside your "pet" containers that you would normally install on your actual system. The container keeps everything tidy and self-contained. I have a container for development, another for music/DAW, another for certain games that needed weird deps.
Fedora Kinoite/Silverblue come with `Toolbx`[1] preinstalled, but I found `distrobox`[2] to be more flexible for my needs. I layered distrobox onto my base image, and it just works.
Many GUI apps are available via Flatpaks, and can be installed directly or via the Software Center. You can enable Flathub[3] as a source, so there's a ton of available software, including Steam, Chrome, Firefox, Discord, Spotify and more. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and self-contained, so they can't pollute/break your system either.
Immutable is indeed the future. The moment a user installs something on a traditional mutable OS, it's configuration/environment drifts from the "base", making any system update or application install a potential conflict. After you install something on a traditional mutable OS, there's often no way to get back to the base without a OS reinstall (programs don't clean up after themselves, they change system settings, environment, more/worse).
Immutable operating systems solve this by having an immutable base image. Everyone running, for instance, Kinoite 42.20251011.0 all have exactly the same base. Users then can "layer" applications on top of the base image, sort of like a dockerfile. If something breaks, you just remove that application (layer) and it's like it never happened. Everyone having the same exact base image also means updates can be much more thoroughly tested, and confidently rolled-out to users.
Note, "Immutable" doesn't mean you can't save files or install things - it just means you cannot mutate the base OS image. There's always a "known good configuration" to go back to.
You're also encouraged to use "pet" containers for things like development - where you will install all sorts of weird system packages, libraries, tools, etc. without fear of polluting or breaking your system.
An immutable system + pet containers means your system will always be stable. Really neat.