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
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 3.8Ghz 8-Core 64GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$3180.00
Dell XC630 Server 3.00Ghz 8-Core 128GB 2x 800GB SAS SSD 12G 8x NEW 2TB SSD H730P
$2598.15
Supermicro 4U 4x Nvidia GPU AI Server 2.6Ghz 8-Core 256GB 2x10G SFP+ 2x2200W
$1382.00
Dell OptiPlex 7050 Desktop 3.40GHz Intel Core i5-7500 8GB DDR4 RAM NO HDD
$70.00
Intel - Core i7-13700K 13th Gen 16 cores 8 P-cores + 8 E-cores 30M Cache, 3.4...
$489.99
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$689.99
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core 32-thread Desktop Processor
$319.99
Dell Precision 3420 SFF Intel Core i5-6500 8GB RAM 256GB SSD WIN 11
$75.00
HP Z820 8-Core 2.60GHz E5-2670 128GB RAM No HDD No OS
$235.90