The immutability aspect is kind of irrelevant in the end. I’ve run Linux for decades, and the occasional nuke and pave every couple years just cleans things up IMO. Use a dotfile backup if it really concerns you, but I don’t bother other than to keep my ssh keys. I can fix up Plasma the way I like it in about 2 minutes and install the rest of the software as I need it if it isn’t already there.
That said, I’ve run vanilla Fedora KDE for a few years now and never had a reason to reinstall on any of my machines, it Just Werks. And all the instructions for installing/fixing things are relevant.
I tried Aurora and that was a disaster within a few hours, even using the pre-installed Distrobox manager Box Buddy (put in to allow containerized installs to work around the immutability aspect) led to weird things happening like it not being able to clone a box, and when you drilled through all the layers to run the underlying Docker commands, it still failed, for no apparent reason. Install the same stack on vanilla Fedora, no problems. I ended up with trust issues in the underlying OS and I don’t need to deal with undiagnosable bullshit like that.
The immutability aspect is kind of irrelevant in the end. I’ve run Linux for decades, and the occasional nuke and pave every couple years just cleans things up IMO. Use a dotfile backup if it really concerns you, but I don’t bother other than to keep my ssh keys. I can fix up Plasma the way I like it in about 2 minutes and install the rest of the software as I need it if it isn’t already there.
That said, I’ve run vanilla Fedora KDE for a few years now and never had a reason to reinstall on any of my machines, it Just Werks. And all the instructions for installing/fixing things are relevant.
I tried Aurora and that was a disaster within a few hours, even using the pre-installed Distrobox manager Box Buddy (put in to allow containerized installs to work around the immutability aspect) led to weird things happening like it not being able to clone a box, and when you drilled through all the layers to run the underlying Docker commands, it still failed, for no apparent reason. Install the same stack on vanilla Fedora, no problems. I ended up with trust issues in the underlying OS and I don’t need to deal with undiagnosable bullshit like that.