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.
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 3.8Ghz 8-Core 256GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$3472.00
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$689.99
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$489.99
Apple Mac Pro Processor Tray 5,1 2010 2012 2.4ghz 8 core
$79.99
Intel - Core i9-12900K Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unloc...
$619.99
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$419.99
Intel Core i9-13900KF Unlocked Desktop Processor - 24 Cores (8P+16E) & 32 Thread
$539.99
Intel Xeon E5-2667 V2 LGA 2011 3.3GHz 8 Core 130W 25MB 8GT/s CPU Processor
$24.00
Dell Optiplex 5060 SFF 8th Gen Core i7 3.2GHZ 16GB 512GB Win 11 Pro
$249.00
HP Z2 Mini G9 Workstation Desktop PC Core i7 NVIDIA T1000 64GB DDR5 512GB SSD
$814.99