I've been using immutable Linux on both my workstation and my servers for 2 years now.
It definitely fits into the enterprise niche, but imho it's good for everyone. Mainly because of the ability to quicly revert back to a working state. One of the worst things that can happen as a Linux user is that some update causes an issue and forces you to spend the rest of your day troubleshooting.
Since switching to ostree I just revert back to the previous working image, pin it, and continue on with my day. Trying the update later to see if the issue is resolved.
This out of box is incredibly useful to beginners who don't want to learn how to troubleshoot Linux. But also enterprise sector.
In the Enterprise sector I think rather immutable server OS is causing a shift in the perspective of Linux to more of an Appliance than a full blown server.
My last project was actually setting up a series of container hosts on-premises in a Hypervisor. I opted to use CoreOS and could simply disable SSH on the nodes because there was no need to login to any of these nodes. If we want to make an update we re-image them in the hypervisor and re-provision the new image.
This shaves off a lot of issues like for example manual changes, configuration drift, security issues with providing shells and multi-user login.
I use NixOS on many of my machines, because it's also able to easily revert/roll back changes, plus you get declarative configuration and a bunch of other stuff that immutable, but imperative, distros don't give you.
It definitely fits into the enterprise niche, but imho it's good for everyone. Mainly because of the ability to quicly revert back to a working state. One of the worst things that can happen as a Linux user is that some update causes an issue and forces you to spend the rest of your day troubleshooting.
Since switching to ostree I just revert back to the previous working image, pin it, and continue on with my day. Trying the update later to see if the issue is resolved.
This out of box is incredibly useful to beginners who don't want to learn how to troubleshoot Linux. But also enterprise sector.
In the Enterprise sector I think rather immutable server OS is causing a shift in the perspective of Linux to more of an Appliance than a full blown server.
My last project was actually setting up a series of container hosts on-premises in a Hypervisor. I opted to use CoreOS and could simply disable SSH on the nodes because there was no need to login to any of these nodes. If we want to make an update we re-image them in the hypervisor and re-provision the new image.
This shaves off a lot of issues like for example manual changes, configuration drift, security issues with providing shells and multi-user login.