I've yet to see a serious review of Duckduckgo browser, the only thing I saw was that because of it's agreement with Microsoft for their search engine the browser, for a time, had rules to avoid blocking Microsoft tracking.
Well in the end I think I'm needlessly nitpicking. It doesn't matter if it's strictly immutable or not. What matter is that it has the good parts of reproducibility, immutability and declarativity.
Isn't immutability related to the root filesystem being read-only? I can write on my root filesystem, even if it's mostly links to the store I can replace those links.
I’ve had NixOS absolutely refuse to run some compiler toolchain I depended upon that should’ve been dead simple on other distros, I’m really hesitant to try anything that tries to be too different anymore.
Yes, some toolchain expect you to run pre-compiled dynamically linked binaries. These won't work on NixOS, you need to either find a way to install the binary from nix and force the toolchain to use it or run patchelf on it somehow.
Well that was an approximation to keep it simple and disprove the given example. There are other directories in the root filesystem that are in the path by default, or used in some other critical way (like /etc). Even if they are links to directories in the nix store you can replace the link.
To be honest I don't know these very well. I only use NixOS. My understanding is that in an immutable distribution the root filesystem is read-only. Granted in NixOS the nix store is immutable and most things in the root filesystem are just links to the nix store, but the root filesystem itself is not read-only.
I don't really know mint but why not install it through your package manager?