Scenario A: It becomes (strictly) better and/or easier than the alternative. Kinda like how systemd effectively replaced SysVinit within a couple of years, simply because it was a more sane alternative. But this is reliant on the read-only aspect being put in place without affecting existing workflows on traditional distros. So, as Fedora Atomic is the atomic distro I'm most familiar with, I'll provide explicit examples from it:

Installing packages shouldn't take a reboot to take effect. I can see sysexts being leveraged for this eventually.
Any commands that involve dnf should (somehow) continue to function. It could even be an alias (or something) that invokes something else entirely. I don't even think most users will care for what exactly happens in the background, as long as the functional expectation is being met.
The previous two points shouldn't come at a (significant) speed loss.

Scenario B: It's enforced on us by (some of) our Linux overlords and/or expected by (parts of) the Desktop Linux stack. Kinda like how the GNOME desktop environment currently has dependencies that are systemd-components. Thus, requiring some hacking to make it work in its absence. Currently, I can only see some RHEL(-adjacent) projects committing to this.

But I think both of the above scenarios are at least 5 years away. While atomic/immutable distros enjoy a healthy (perhaps even generous) amount of development, AFAIK none of them are actually 100% feature-complete^[To be clear, it's probably at like 95% or so.] compared to their traditional counterparts. So, fixing (most of) the remaining edge cases to make migration possible for every enthusiast that even considers switching, should probably be their priority.

[–] Shadow_Glider@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 hour ago

NixOS doesn't require a reboot for installing packages to take effect

[–] radamant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

You’re just supposed to use flatpak or stuff like distrobox/toolbx. No reboots necessary.

[–] ViatorOmnium@piefed.social 1 points 1 hour ago

Which is still very rough around the edges. There's still software that doesn't work properly at all some setups, and flatseal is still essential to make some other apps work as expected.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 hours ago

It's definitely getting there.

I found the regular Fedora SilverBlue install did not give enough flexibility to be very usable. The suggestion to just use toolkits is not for mortals. I copied Bazzite and installed homebrew (coming from Mac, that's comfortable). Brew solved 95% of the pain.

The next annoying 4% was stuff that doesn't work well with flatpack: Steam, gamescope, password managers, etc.

Then there's a final 1% of the masses of content written about Fedora using rpm and dnf that just kinda doesn't work. Makes stuff like following a build guide or install steps a little bit more annoying.

The really nice thing about it though is I was able to switch between different fedora environments and bazzite with relatively little pain. Nothing really broke, which was great.

If the future of the desktop is linux, it needs immutable distros to get really good. Personally, I wouldn't want to go back to fully-root-editable linux, but I also do not blame the folks (who want to) to be able to nuke systemd and Wayland (which both do too much for my taste) and do their own thing.