[therein]

> I also have a TrueNAS, but because of its limitations (read-only root file system)

It isn't really the case. TrueNAS wants you to look at it as an appliance so they make it work that way out of the box.

On the previous release, they had only commented out the apt repos but you could write to the root filesystem.

On the latest release, they went a little further and did lock the root filesystem by default but using a single command (`sudo /usr/local/libexec/disable-rootfs-protection`), root becomes writable and the commented out apt repos are restored. It just works.

[chme]

But AFAIK, updates will overwrite everything, so installing anything is just temporary.

[therein]

I have both of these releases running side by side for multiple years by now. It will not auto-update between releases anyway similarly to how nobody would do a dist-upgrade on you automatically. Neither have ever overwritten my changes to enable rootfs rw + apt repo fix and other changes to the filesystem, no more than a normal Debian would. Enabling apt actually gets you a more up to date system than you'd get otherwise.