Mat, assuming you do end up setting up an immutable system, I would be interested in a review, once you have practical experience. It sounds like it would meet your use case needs, whereas it did not seem that way for me, but it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in the experiences of others. I’ve been one to say for decades that one solution simply does not suit every situation. Enterprise mainframe systems, for instance, are outstanding, secure, and powerful for their use case, but they are cumbersome to use for those who are constantly on the move. When I was flying across the country, then halfway across the Pacific Ocean for my first trip to Hawaii, I saw a lot of very nice looking laptop systems. A few of the ones that had really nice displays, and their owners used them to watch movies, conduct business during the trip, and communicate with others. Those laptops were perfect for that scenario, but most of them probably wouldn’t be ideal for me on a limited budget. The point is that different services, different systems and different methodologies have their place. While it may be just right for certain scenarios, it’s a clumsy or frustrating experience in others. Those cool mobile laptops might not be best to run a payroll or personnel system for instance.
Taking this back to immutable distros, I do hope that someone here does have a useful scenario where these work out, and I’ll love to read about those experiences when a person who can take positive advantage of this methodology is able to share with us. I’m looking forward to finding out the best experiences at that time.
Hey, Brian. Don’t hold your breath for a review. 
I was just thinking out loud that one might be able to take bare Debian, which already checks off question 2 (stability) and 3 (set and forget, mostly), and add something to handle 1 (roll back). Going for read only protection or containers (questions 4 & 5) seems more trouble than it’s worth for my (personal use) purposes. Were I to provide services to clients (for example), or worse, provide clients with the ability to change things, then core immutability would help keep me from wondering if I’ve missed something. Final thought while writing: if immutability could be turned off while a core component was being intentionally modified then I’d be more inclined to consider it for my use.
Yeah, I see your point Mat. If you want stability, a straight Debian system can do it without having to experiment at all in immutable software. Containers are another topic and object with a name that’s suspect.
I’d rather design an organization and configuration, as you suggest, that’s specific to a project or a client. Immutable is a technology looking for a market. I don’t see much of a market for it myself.
Yeah, I’m not sure what I’d call it. I used Kickstart for CentOS systems, but I switched to Ubuntu a while back and never fully automated that. I also haven’t created a VM in a while.
For my Macs, I have a setup of scripts I run that do a lot of setup – they configure Finder, Safari, the NFS automounter, and some other things.
For all of my Unix systems, I share my shell config using git, and I absolutely love that setup. It’s the only way I can keep all of my systems usable and synchronized.
I’m currently testing Bluefin
Except for Gnome, I like it so far—I can’t say much more than that yet 