These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They're really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.
Immutable are the ultimate tinkerer's distros. It's just a different way of tinkering. True tinkering in immutable means creating your own image from the base image and that allows you to add or remove packages, change configs, services, etc.
Example: you create your own image. You decide you want to try something, but you're being cautious. So you create a new image based on your first with your changes. You try it out and you don't like it or it doesn't work for some reason, you can just revert back to you other image.
Another thing worth mentioning, with these distros, you can switch between images at will. I'm new to Linux as my daily driver desktop OS, and I've rebased three times. It's really cool to be able to do that.
You can install packages in immutable distros. It's just not as easy and recommended as a last resort.
With Universal Blue (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) you can install packages with "layering". It's basically modifying the image by adding packages on top of what is shipped by the distro, and those packages get added each time the image is updated.
The better, more involved solution is to create your own image from the base image. That gives you a lot more control. You can even remove packages from the base image.
Hopefully you've had time to read some ify the replies from the folks behind Bazzite.
I would argue that it's not bad marketing because no one is marketing it. Universal Blue, and by extension Bazzite, is a purely FOSS, community run endeavor.
Just because cloud became an over used buzzword by tech vulture capitalists, doesn't mean it doesn't apply to what they're doing, and it doesn't mean that it's suspicious.
Universal Blue is built by good folks making good shit.
What an absolutely shallow take. This isn't about French fries or fast food. This is about end stage capitalism and how corporations are just nakedly colluding with each other.
This is why the cost of just about everything is increasing faster than inflation.
I did this recently. Opendrive is free up to 5 gb and works with rclone. All I'm backing up is the config and data needed to recreate my containerized services. I've even had to recreate them from the backup, once.
I make a coffee flavored pudding by heating milk to 180F, stirring in ground coffee, waiting maybe 20-30 seconds, filtering out the grounds, and finally making pudding from that milk.
I have no idea what that milk would taste like, but the pudding is fantastic.
These distros are great for beginners or less technically savvy. They're really just harder for people who have been using Linux forever and are very accustomed to the old ways.