I would argue it’s the opposite of being good with beginners. Having used many distros for years, with most of my time spent in Arch and NixOS, nix basically follows zero Linux conventions and requires you to learn a new language, learn the conventions of the nix community and ecosystem (channels vs flakes, home manager, etc)

I primarily use nix but it’s specifically because I can write nix files and use them anywhere, so I’m a hobbyist, not a beginner

Mint is good for total beginners. Arch is good for those that really want to learn how Linux works. Nix is for those that want a reproducible system, not beginners

You still have freedom. Putting “read only” on some files isn’t taking away fundamental freedom, it’s a design choice. You can still meddle with it if you go further up the chain (e.g. make your own OS fork), just like you can meddle with your normal, pre-packaged Linux kernel if you want to compile it yourself.

I think even the most power of power users could appreciate an immutable distro in the right situation: if it’s the right fit and you don’t need to tweak those details, immutability gives you some technical benefits as a trade-off.

I personally just don’t want to mess with “the core” of my PC

I like to install a lot of stuff from all around, and usually they all have these different dependencies that I might have to install separately… I use immutable because I want to know that I can purge any of that stuff easily without messing with anything else, because it’s all separated from each other.

An example on the windows side is a Tetramino stacking game called “DTET”. It’s so old that I had to install some runtime from Visual Basic 6 to run it. When I no longer need DTET, am I going to remember to remove it?

With immutable, I can just nuke whatever container I installed the program in if need be.