What's up with all these immutable distributions? What are the benefits and disadvantages of them?

comfisofa@lemmy.ml to Linux@lemmy.ml – 186 points –

For once I feel a little out of touch after I took a bit of a break from following the news to focus on studying, and suddenly everyone is talking about immutable distributions. What are they exactly? What are the benefits and the disadvantages of immutable systems?

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By having the right configuration file there as part of the package's options, like:

globalProgram.doFoo = true; or something like

globalProgram.extraConfig = "barCount=4567";

Are those changes system-wide or stored in user space? Where are those files stored?

It's system-wide (unless home-manager is involved).

They're a part of the immutable install, whose components reside in /nix/store and are symlinked to /etc.

Example from my computer:

$ realpath /etc/sddm.conf 
/nix/store/slkq2k8vc4rx4ag55zf8ssl7qd9ry49v-sddm.conf