It’s interesting for me to see your views on this. You (and other long term users) have intimately known how linux has been and the change seems to go against some of your fundamental understandings of how you like linux to work. I believe you when you say these features add more complexity. What I find interesting though, is that I am a user who is gaining their fundamental understanding of linux through these technologies. For me, it makes sense for things to work this way. I want to learn to make my system do whatever I need it to and in learning and exploring linux I’ve found a ton of different tools, all built for different systems with different languages and dependencies etc. I used to be frustrated when I found a cool repo on github and had to figure out how to build from source if the devs hadn’t specifically built it for my system. And eventually, my system would become very muddy. Now, on an immutable system I use toolbox and distrobox to open up a container, safely away from my core system. I can create containers based on specific distro architecture (fedora 41 or 42, arch, ubuntu latest etc.) Within my containers I can use the basic package managers like dnf or pacman. If I do it wrong, I delete that container and try again, no harm done, no uninstalling packages. It keeps my host os clean and I don’t get as confused when I think about everything I have done to my system over time. In my mental model of my system, I think of things in this containerized way, which for me has helped me learn and do more than when I was I was trying to envision it all as one big idea. For certain tools I can even “export” them to the host system and alias the command so the containers automatically launch and run as if they were actually installed on the host system. While it seems like more steps, for me it feels like necessary steps. Linux is complex and this organizes it in a way that makes it feel accessible for me. To sum it all up, I’m not offering this as an opposing opinion but rather as an interesting observation. Linux has always grown and evolved. While immutability may not reach broad popularity, new users growing up in this technology might learn to use it well, much how you and others have learned to use non-immutability well. As much as system recovery and maintenence is important to know, I have generations of programmers who have figured out a lot of that and built tools that allow me to not focus on that and just use linux. I love that idea, and I’m grateful for it. Thanks for the article and comments, its great to put this technology in perspective and helps me feel sure of my decision to use it.