dear Andrew,
On Thu, 27 Sep 2018, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
> I've been using a live USB of Devuan with XFCE, I boot it to RAM and
> then setup my temporary environment from a different LUKS encrypted USB.
have you tried
https://heads.dyne.org?
is a Devuan derivative based on Beowulf (current testing) hardened for
security, routing all traffic through tor and removing all non-free
firmware (100% free). Maybe it works for your case, maybe not (the
persistent setup aka "nesting" is not yet there) but since you seem to
have all the persistance scripts by yourself, this live USB may do
well for your purpose.
ciao