I don’t have an answer to your nvidia question, but before you go and spend $2000 on an nvidia card, you should give the rocm docker containers a shot worh your existing card. https://hub.docker.com/u/rocm https://github.com/ROCm/ROCm-docker
it’s made my use of rocm 1000x easier than actually installing it on my system and was sufficient for my uses of running inference on my 6700xt.
just a small correction, /etc does get snapshotted when upgrades happen and will roll back along with everything else. you are correct though that home does not get snapshotted and is fully mutable.