Erase your darlings: immutable infrastructure for mutable systems - Graham Christensen
Deeply terrifying inbox-zero quest for intentionality around working machine state.
I'm a hoarder. Like Bernadette doing KonMari, I notice that this approach to daily-driver maintenance is irrelevant to me in its highest form. My personal machine is a pet, not cattle.
Nonetheless, we can understand a lot about how to keep our pets well-groomed from this approach. We ultimately want to create a stable workflow to elevate state to configuration.
Opting out
Before we can opt in to saving data, we must opt out of saving data by default. I do this by setting up my filesystem in a way that lets me easily and safely erase the unwanted data, while preserving the data I do want to keep.
My preferred method for this is using a ZFS dataset and rolling it back to a blank snapshot before it is mounted. A partition of any other filesystem would work just as well too, running mkfs at boot, or something similar. If you have a lot of RAM, you could skip the erase step and make / a tmpfs.