The idea is that the immutability of the operating system leads to greater stability. The partition should (in theory) be exactly as the distribution expects on every computer it’s installed to, which limits the potential for user changes breaking anything. The benefit to the user is that it’s a lot harder to shoot yourself in the foot by running the wrong script.

For me, the point is not security, but maintenance. Whenever system upgrades have gone wrong, it's almost always been a partial update, and that just no longer happens.

I've found doing work in containers made things straightforward enough, as a developer. Though I still somewhat think that that's just moving the problem - I'm not quite keeping those containers up-to-date. `distrobox assemble` helps a bit though.