Realistically, immutability wouldn’t have made a difference. Definition updates like this are generally not considered part of the provisioned OS (since they change somewhere around hourly) and would go into /var or the like, which is mutable persistent state on nearly every otherwise immutable OS. Snapshots like Timeshift are more likely to help.
It’s a huge reason why I use BTRFS snapshots. I’m a bit more lax about what gets snapshotted on my desktop, but on a server, everything should live in a snapshot. If an update goes bad, revert to the last snapshot (and snapshots are cheap, so run one with every change and delete older ones).
Realistically, immutability wouldn’t have made a difference. Definition updates like this are generally not considered part of the provisioned OS (since they change somewhere around hourly) and would go into
/var
or the like, which is mutable persistent state on nearly every otherwise immutable OS. Snapshots like Timeshift are more likely to help.It’s a huge reason why I use BTRFS snapshots. I’m a bit more lax about what gets snapshotted on my desktop, but on a server, everything should live in a snapshot. If an update goes bad, revert to the last snapshot (and snapshots are cheap, so run one with every change and delete older ones).