Immutable distros aren’t bad and can be a good thing. I just think it will take time before they are able to be troubleshooted by someone who may not be all that familiar with Linux.
Maybe I’m just hesitant to use something I don’t understand. As far as updates go theoretically you shouldn’t need to roll back if your testing is good enough. Reliability is why you use something stable and review each update before deploying. There needs to be a testing and validation pipeline for each update. Then again, that is not really possible for a one man team. In that case I would recommend setting up a generic image that spins up and creates a new machine id and keys before getting taken over by Ansible automation.
This is the kind of stuff that is used to admin thousands of VMs. Maybe it is simpler to use immutable distros but I haven’t heard much from people who use them.
Overall I think I’ll give them a shot in a VM. As for the user asking for help I’ll just let them decide what’s best for there needs.
If you have more than a handful of VMs Ansible is the answer