You’re right that “immutable” is a bit of a misnomer in that regard, and it’s been argued that “atomic” is a more fitting term.

And I agree that a lot of documentation and how-to-guides don’t account for immutable setups (yet?), which can get novice users especially in a lot of trouble.

Personally, I prefer a declarative system (NixOS) that solves this problem rather cleanly and gives me most benefits of so-called immutable distros as well.

I find it hard to imagine a system that is not borkable by a superuser. Maybe it’s helpful to think of immutable setups as harder to bork by accident during routine maintenance (e.g. through faulty updates) and more resilient to bad code (through containerization).

That seems to be a common usage of the term, but strictly speaking, “userspace” is anything that’s not the kernel. This includes system-level programs, libraries and settings configured as “root” that can affect all users.

Thanks for clarifying! I can totally see where that sort of stuff can really mess things up.

My experience with development environments has been a bit better: Node works out of the box, no problem. For Ruby, the workflow took a little setting up (with bundix), but ended up working very reliably. For R, I actually enjoy that I can set up all my packages with home-manager and they get updated in my regular update cycle and it’s not a separate process altogether.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by “pain with static linkage”? If my links have broken in NixOS, it was always due to my inability / laziness to set things up correctly.

I have been using NixOS for my daily driver for about a year now, and while it has been a bit of a learning curve to set things up and heavily rewrite my dotfiles, the dependability and availability of packages has been nothing short of amazing. It feels a lot like the final destination for my distro hopping journey.

I use a lot of CLI tools and some system level hackage to get my keybindings just right, so when I tried out Silverblue I had to load in a lot of stuff through rpm-ostree, which was less than ideal. But if OP wants a rock solid system with Flatpak apps, I wholeheartedly second Silverblue.