Precisely this is what I was about to comment, Thanks. Let me add that I’m using uBlue KDE flavor (Aurora) and don’t get me wrong, I love it… but for many reasons I’d rather not be using an immutable distro. As a personal decision. I prefer the Snapper approach, it gives you the benefit without any of the ‘costs’. But that’s how I see the ‘other differences’. To me, an experienced user and programmer, these ‘features’ are drawbacks. Immutable distros are quite good for non-power users (or whatever we may call them). Anyone without enough experience to understand the output of env | grep PATH (to put it in some random terms). If you want to fiddle with your system, customize the shell, etc… some simple stuff that made me fall in love with Linux might be just too difficult in an immutable system… at least this was my experience as a +10 year Linux user. Just adding ZSH to the distro is somewhat difficult enough, so the distro mantainers added a ‘just recipe’ (which is just a Makefile, see uBlue ujust docs) to do the stuff you would consider normal if you had any CLI experience; so stuff like tweaking your system (e.g. in the past I’ve used arch btw) will now be alienated from usual sources like simple online documentation… But I had to try this to get to know it. So, all in all, I think these immutable distros are great for someone who just starts on Linux or programming, and forces them to keep a clean home directory, nothing crazy like conda, pip install, pipx, etc. which I’ve learn as a dev to use; and have full knowledge of what they do with my env. Forced me to use devcontainer, cool… I guess… So, that’s the “safety” that I got from an immutable system, just being forced to keeping it tidy. Not bad, specially for a rolling distro like Fedora (the base for universal blue/ aurora.)
Spain? check guifi.net ;)
People had LAN Partys playing video games “offline” in the 90s… Setting up a network is easy, the difficulty comes from scaling up to many nodes, and spreading through the geography (e.g. if you were to use antennas for WLAN, they would need a mostly unobstructed vision) which in urban areas gets tricky.
But those “topology” issues can be flattened, e.g. you can always have a raspberry pi (or any device) acting as server in the corner of a neighborhood. A virtual bulletin board, emails, etc. all could be self-hosted locally there and then people could go grab a coffee and consume the local news just like in the middle ages, but with a screen, digital assets and some healthy amount of trolling :P