Linux

Immutable distros seem to get a lot of hate, and a lot of it seems misplaced (and imo from people that haven't really read up on it). I want to try to clear up a couple of common misconptions:

Immutability: Immutability is not the purpose of coreos or microos, but rather a side effect. The purpose is reproducibility, and for that immutability is needed. This is related to the mechanism used to achieve reproducibility. That doesn't mean immutability isn't a useful side-effect (security), it just means it's not the main objective.

Reproducibility: The main desired outcome. And why I don't understand opinions like "why are they still made (since nobody wants it)". Reproducibility has been worked on for along time in the OS world and is a worthy goal. We aren't there yet but an obvious use case is voting machines. A more immediate benefit is: we can finally guarantee that a collection of packages that has been extensively tested will be deployed bit to bit in all servers.

User usage: there is an argument to made that this isn't useful in end-user distros, and is more of a server feature. Largely for linux power users this will continue to be true. But for others: it lets the distro makers make a stronger guarantee on the interoperability of the programs packaged in a specific version. A OS version has been tested thoroughly and you get a bit to bit copy of it. No more "package X broke package Y". Or "package Z is missing from the dependencies". Reproducible distros have the potential to be a more "out-of-the-box" stable experience.

I would argue that calling them "immutable" is part of what is fueling a lot of the hate and misconceptions. I would prefer "reproducible distros". Another often ignored aspects is the the newness of the technology. While these distros look to provide a more stable experience, for now that won't be case (but they aren't far away anymore).

Final note: to those power users that hate the idea that they can't "control" the distro, coreos based distros are already capable of using containers images as a transport. This means you can do anything you want through a Containerfile. And you can deploy this exact configuration to all you computers. No need for scripts to extract and install your desired configuration, just pull your personal OS image from your image registry.

Wrap up: I don't understand how a someone who uses linux in the server world can not see the value of this tech. It offers a long wanted solution to server deployment: using container engines ability to abstract the OS environment from the application environment. To be short: it lets the OS and the apps it runs live "their own life", with independent update cycles.