It’s better to avoid re-encoding as it lose quality.

It’s way more accurate that google map. But it lacks a lot of stores and opening times in less touristy countries.

If you want to contribute check out StreetComplete for an easy way.

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.

Yes, or use flakes which gives you a lockfile pinning everything. But this is related to reproducibility, not immutability.

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.

These seems to be related to flatpak, not immutability.

What things?

What namespace are you talking about?

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’m on NixOS right now and just dropped a Chewy in my /bin, only had to sudo touch /bin/chewy.

if it’s being read from, it can be written to.

Why would being able to read imply being able to write?

Having an extra step or two in the way doesn’t make it “extremely secure”.

Well it can greatly improve security by preventing a compromised app to achieve persistence.

The store is immutable but the system itself definitely isn’t.

I wouldn’t call NixOS immutable.

You can destroy it all the same with cp or cat.

OK, I’ve never used WhatsApp so I thought you meant that with these changes the regular call feature would be broken.

What do you mean? They can phone without, they install it to “communicate with boomeer relatives”, as it’s written.

I don’t see what you can do at the protocol level to improve availability, you still need people storing the file and acting as peers. Some trackers try to improve that by incentivizing long term seeding.

Like the 13.1 torrent being only a patch to the 13 one and listing it as a dependency? Downloading the 13.1 torrent would transparently download the 13 if it wasn’t already, then download the 13.1 patch and apply it. But I don’t think any of this needs to be at the protocole level, that’s client functionality.