How to configure Ubuntu to boot from a remote system image?

Question

System administration

The trading company has a fleet of desktops for which managers work.
The cars are all different. All have different versions of Ubuntu, varying degrees of updating.
At the same time, the software requirements for all managers are almost identical. The only difference: these are accounts and some software settings, for example: signatures of letters in email clients.
The problem, of course, is the following: it is very tedious to update and configure each machine individually. In addition, sometimes after updating some Cups stops working with the printer, you have to roll back to the old version. It's easier to build a specific image, test it, and distribute it to everyone to work with.
The idea is the following:

• put a unified system image on a server in the local network
  
• desktops will download and boot from this image when the computer is turned on (you do not need to download it every time - only if there is a newer version of the image)
  
• place the user folder on the local disk of desktops
  

Thin clients and other "remote sessions" do not want to. I want desktops to use their power and not be dependent on network stability in the process of work. In addition, we have machines outside the local network, it is easy to set up a preliminary sending of a fresh version of the image there (for example, a machine can download a fresh image during its operation, but before loading), but we don’t want to make such machines dependent on the network.
Questions:

• is it a worthwhile idea or are there better options
  
• how to implement it: maybe there are some well-known approaches or ready-made solutions (I don’t know in what form)
  
• what problems can arise, for example: different hardware on all desktops
  
• what else should I know?
  

Answer 1

The system image is a big enough thing and downloading it every time you turn on the machine is not a good idea.
Maybe it will be easier for you to use puppet/chef/ansible? He, in general, is needed for this, in order to manage configurations.