The Debian-Live approach also provides some good opportunities. First and foremost, the very easy remastering makes it efficient to run with no persistent store quite often. For instance, upon remastering, I just start without the store, and the image I run is union-mounted with the persistence file and copied&compressed. Then I have to boot something else to copy the new squashfs image in place, but that's all that has to be done outside the system.
Boot the new image without persistence, create a new persistence file.
For further adaptations, the new persistence file can be mounted in an instance run under kvm, programs can be added and settings tweaked for an eventual new remastering.
Storing the series of squashfs-compressed images, one can always go back in this process if needed.
Dell Optiplex 5060 SFF 8th Gen Core i7 3.2GHZ 16GB 512GB Win 11 Pro
$249.00
Dell 9020 Optiplex Micro-Intel Core i5 - 1TB SSD 8GB RAM Window 11
$129.49
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$689.99
AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core - 16-Thread 4.2 GHz (5.0 GHz Max Boost) Socket A...
$339.95
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$489.99
HP Chromebase Desktop PC 21.5" FHD Core i3-10110U Intel UHD 8GB DDR4 128GB SSD
$359.99
Apple Mac Pro Processor Tray 5,1 2010 2012 2.4ghz 8 core
$79.99
Intel Xeon E5-2667 V2 LGA 2011 3.3GHz 8 Core 130W 25MB 8GT/s CPU Processor
$24.00
Lenovo IdeaCentre 3 07IRB8 Desktop Intel Core i5-13400 16GB 512GB SSD W11H
$429.99
HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram Dual 256GB SSD K420 Linux GA
$234.98