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?
In the case of NixOS at least, ‘immutable’ doesn’t mean you can’t change the system at all.
It just means you cannot change the currently installed set of packages and services (generation in NixOS parlance); all you can do is create new ones and delete old ones.
Basically every update might as well be a complete reinstall of
/usr,/etcand whatnot if you compare it to traditional distros.