“It’s been wild to read endless online complaints from so-called ‘technical’ RPi users for the last 13 years about SD card wear and tear…”
A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern.
Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground between a full RAM-boot distro (piCore, Alpine diskless, NetBSD) and a standard SD-based Raspberry Pi OS.
You still get the normal ecosystem and docs, but almost no writes hit the card unless you explicitly commit them.
For anyone stuck between “I want something simple” and “I don’t want my SD to die,” overlays are the easiest win.
A lot of the SD-card wear issues come from people running “normal PC workflows” on a storage medium that was never designed for that pattern.
Something I’ve seen help many newcomers is simply enabling an overlay filesystem or tmpfs-based writes. It’s basically the middle ground between a full RAM-boot distro (piCore, Alpine diskless, NetBSD) and a standard SD-based Raspberry Pi OS.
You still get the normal ecosystem and docs, but almost no writes hit the card unless you explicitly commit them.
For anyone stuck between “I want something simple” and “I don’t want my SD to die,” overlays are the easiest win.