[Charon77]

As much as I am an avid arch linux fanboy, I don't think it's a good choice for "an appliance", the frequent update might cause unnecessary wear and tear for the storage chips if they use flash memory/sd card.

Lazy me would often update pacman database and upgrade just a few packages. Living dangerously but often times it doesn't really matter

If reproducible build is important maybe consider NixOS?