I feel like inmutable distros are in a quite good state nowadays, and while solutions like bootc and sysexts are not “mainstream” yet, it’s getting there
when it comes to getting non Flatpak packages, things get interesting, there are a lot of options, really
AppImages, statically linked binaries, tarballs, OCI containers, distrobox/toolbx, Homebrew, VMs, Nix even experimental formats like RunImages, AppBundles and FlatImages
if you need some non-system level package, you’ll have a way to use it yet, still it seems sort of chaotic “which one should I choose? how will I be able to easily manage them?”
GPM, dbin, Soar, AM… and the list goes on
and it’s okay, the so called cloud native approach is still evolving, so this fragmentation is expected so it’s nice to share opinions about this while we’re living this interesting phase any thoughts?
Immutable in the actual sense yes, it is basically a product and every other software is installed aside from it.
But you can also have better managed systems like nix or ostree, that reduce entropy or at least make it fully declarative so theoretically finding and reproducing issues is easy