I don't follow what it is that you're looking for with chroot.

In my experience I've used it for either fixing a non-booting system from some other working distro, or as a clean build environment to build packages, or some basic testing in a separate root from my actual one.

You sound like you want to be able to try out a distro before installing it, using chroot? Wouldn't the easiest way be to just use a live distro? You would get a full distro to try with zero effort, other than downloading and creating bootable media, which you would be doing anyway with a chroot plus more work setting it up. What's the benefit to trying to do that?

That's good, but there's a simpler version above in this thread.

That's what I've usually done for decades (also slackpkg+, sbotools, maybe or not a few extra packages/sets.)

Thanks; useful to know that... not sure how I'd mount bind just one file (rather than directory) but I'd normally want to add a long resolv.conf anyway. I'd also update /etc/profile and some other things.

That was stated (not from other operating system (OS) distributions (distros) though, but from a boot/recovery .ISO/CD... typically Slackware or Unix, but any decent one that has a shell and standard Unix utilities such as chroot.)

You sound like you make unwarranted assumptions. I don't try out many distros these days; since 1997 I've tried to stick to *BSD Unix and Slackware GNU/Linux, though have been trying out Open Solaris/IllumOS Unix, after I used Solaris in college decades ago also (and I try out a few others, including SARPi and certain touch-focused distros, just for special/newer/less-used hardware or to administer for users, then normally just reboot.) Seriously, sometimes I just prefer to install and start using it immediately, and the benefit is not having to reboot. LiveCDs are often more trouble than they're worth (even the main un-/quasi-official Slackware ones, as they boot to GUI and set some shell behaviour not normally set in official/main Slackware.)