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 Precision T3600 | Xeon E5 | 16GB | GPU | 128GB SSD | Win 10 Pro
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CISCO MCS 7800 (2x) Intel Xeon @ 2.33 GHz 4GB Ram, NO HDD
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Dell PowerEdge R630 8SFF 2.6Ghz 20-Core 128GB Mem 2x10G+2x1G NIC 2x750W PSU
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HP ProLiant DL360 G9 Server 2x E5-2660v3 2.60Ghz 20-Core 96GB P440ar
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Intel Xeon Gold 6126 2.6 GHz LGA 3647 Server CPU Processor SR3B3
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Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 2.4GHz 35MB 14-Core 120W LGA2011-3 SR2N7
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Intel Xeon Gold 6140 SR3AX 2.3GHz 18-Core Processor CPU
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Intel Xeon Gold 6138 2.0GHz 27.5MB 20-Core 125W LGA3647 SR3B5
$46.00
INTEL XEON GOLD 6148 PROCESSOR | 2.40GHZ | SR3B6
$99.99
HP Workstation Z640 2x Xeon E5-2623V4 32GB Ram Dual 256GB SSD K420 Linux GA
$234.98