[puppykito]

Sounds a lot like a immutable filesystem à la Fedora Silverblue. I don't run it myself but I have a friend who does that saves her a lot of the headaches I've encountered while messing with Arch. Of course it's Linux so if that's a deal breaker then don't.

Also there's plenty of software that avoids changes in disk drive after reboot (for library computers and such). Don't know any example sadly.

[tacomagick]

We used DeepFreeze in our smartboards, It would lock onto a disk state and until unlocked would revert the system back to the locked state after every shutdown/reboot.