I do like the idea of an immutable desktop but I despise using snap. Too many loopback devices.
Bit off a dreamland, but if I did have friends/family move to Linux from windows a distro with easy checkpointed rollback would be ideal from a support perspective, but agree it's more of a niche / industry concern then a non technical home user thing
...with everything as snaps. and a flicking lot of loopback devices.
While the prospect of a snap based desktop doesnt fill me with joy personally, I do like the idea of immutable desktops and have heard good things about silverblue and kinoite on the fedora end of things. The improved security from sandboxing and stability are all a big plus.
I'll stick with regular old fedora kde spin for now but immutable desktops are looking more attractive as time goes on.
I am not sure I understand the hype over the immutable distros. I get that it may be important for large deployments (e.g. a company of 500 people starting with the exact same desktop and remain compatible) but don't really get the benefit for the average GNU/Linux user, especially those of us that like tinkering with our PC. I can't see myself installing one of those but perhaps I am missing the point.
I think you got it exactly right, apart from the fact that an "average" desktop Linux user is like 30% [1] company/university computer. For those users it's probably very useful.
[1] a completely uneducated guess.
Also it's useful for your average Joe. Joe don't want to mess with his system, so immutability is his additional layer of security. It's not thing for tinkerers, it's meant to be same base on every system, and everything else is container.