This is something NixOS excels at, but there is a bit of a learning curve. Maybe ansible as a non distro specific approach although I haven't used it myself.

I’ve used commercial systems that provide what you are asking for. I’m not sure it is worth the time to setup for a home lab. I don’t see the ROI for it. Too much initial setup for the small gains afterwards.

I expect you’ll want to bake in a install config and likely a update-all.sh of some sort to each image you want to deploy. I think the frequency of that is the major time suck unless you only use LTS releases.

That said I think a PXE boot server is what you may be looking for.

Clonezilla. I usually prepare images in virtual machines and restore them on physical drives.

I just have a bash script I run after the installation to configure things and install the software I use.

seems likea FOG server: https://fogproject.org/ is what you need.

A awesome project and greatly simplifies the PXE boot process. You have a repo of images you have setup ready to go and be installed.

If you want to use OpenSUSE leap as your OS autoyast is made for that: automatic installation and configuration of new systems without (or with minimal) attendence

Or you could write an bash script that makes all those configurations and just run it after finishing the Install.

An ansible playbook would be another option to do these configurations semi-automatically

I liked fog a few years back

I have a set of shell / powershell scripts that I run post-install to configure everything. They are hosted on a local webserver, so it is just a one-line command to run the appropriate one.

Fog and sysprep.