With chezmoi it will kind of be read only/immutable with templates no? You could use templates in your dotfiles then on local you can specify the data you want to be templated. So your templates would be read only but the actual content in them could be different per machine. And you could have some dotfiles not be templated at all if you don’t use certain configs on different machines.

Reference documentation: https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/templating/#using-chezmoitemplates

Chezmoi has templates and an ignore if you want it to be different on different machines. You can also specify the data you want templated so its kind of dynamic on your other machines. The automatic bit won’t really be automatic but you could run a cron job or systemd service that runs in the background to automatically pull, update and overwrite your dotfiles on a machine but it might be better to just do that manually whenever you log on to the other machine so you know what will get overwritten

Looks like it works just like chezmoi but without having jinja syntax for exclusions. Honestly don’t know which I would prefer more as feels like you’ll have lots of repeated files to overwrite the base directory with this one instead of just having templates. Still very cool project

Any LTS is good for reliability. RHEL clones are pretty good just depends on what someone is looking for.

Edit:
For an actual reason, mainly for the length of the LTS as rocky and alma I believe have a 10 year LTS while Debian have a 5/6 year LTS (sorry if that’s wrong, haven’t checked the length of the LTS in a while)

I’ve currently been running tumbleweed for the past 2 years, has been pretty solid.

I’ve tried out a couple distros and my takeaways are if you want stability, go with an LTS (leap, rocky, alma, devuan etc) and if you want newer packages on top of that you could use something like nixpkgs or build from source for the packages that aren’t there yet.

If you want the latest packages/you do gaming or your hardware is pretty new, a rolling release like arch/artix is probably your best bet.

I just prefer tumbleweed as it comes with some useful stuff preinstalled out of the box. For instance, if I’ve ever had a bad update I’ve always used snapper to roll back as its preconfigured when you use btrfs