Probably true, but I find that new users tend to try to solve problems by installing random RPMs they find online and tainting their systems.

Pushing an immutable OS puts up a barrier that may be annoying, but forces them to do things in a more reasonable way (or they can overlay those random RPMs, with the advantage that they are easier to track since rpm-ostree status will always show a list of manually overlayed packages)

The root filesystem is read only so neither you or applications can write to it. If you wanna find better results it’s probably more often referred to as “immutable” since calling it stateless is maybe a bit loaded on my part.

I actually disagree. I use Flatpak and also maintain a Flatpak myself and I think nowadays they’re mostly af parity with regular applications.

They also solve dependency issues in neat ways which is nice. For example the application I use makes use of a Wine extension that tracks an older Wine, which is something that is particular annoying to deal with outside of the Flatpak environment IMO.

Check out Fedora Silverblue.

I really think having a stateless root is the future of computing. Silverblue has a big focus on using Flatpak and containers to cover most use cases.

The only issue is the default Gnome would probably be too heavy for your hardware but (as others have mentioned) you can overlay KDE and use that instead.

Edit: as others have said below check out Kinoite for a Silverblue spin with KDE by default.