Yes, just yesterday I debugged an issue with my raspberry pi. It would randomly reboot itself about half of the time I ran a certain workload on it.

After swapping out the SD card with a new one, it appears to be fixed. This was hard to diagnose as there was nothing in system logs / error messages about what might have went wrong.

Putting /var/log/ somewhere else mitigates this.

Couple more things to remember:

- don't use swap

- make sure you have noatime on all your filesystems

- identify other folders with frequently changing data (/tmp, $HOME/tmp, etc.) and also make sure you keep them in memory

- you can use NFS for many of these things if that is possible

Something I never understand:

Why is this not the default?

So many people struggle with the same stuff over and over again, yet, there's no mechanism in Linux distros to package default settings for a use case.

You want a stable, easy-to-use platform. Setting /var/log to something other than the main disk risks all kinds of difficult to diagnose problems. If that means burning through SD cards, so be it. It's relatively easy to mod it to write elsewhere, that's exactly the purpose of user customization.

What they ought to do is put an easy way to set that in `raspi-config`

You can solve most of these problems by not using an under powered or bad power supply. From what I have seen most raspberry pi users love to just take a random charger and plug it into their raspberry pi. Micro usb has been known to be totally inadequate as a power delivery mechanism for SBCs and on the armbian forums people are going to complain if you show them an SBC with micro usb. USB C is a lot better but you are still better off with the official raspberry pi power supply.

What is right for Raspberry Pi might not be right for a desktop might not be right for a server.

Typically things are geared for desktop users who have not much idea what they are doing and everybody else is expected to understand and configure to their needs.

Nowadays distributions started preparing separate profiles (workstation, desktop, embedded, etc.) that save a little bit of work.

noatime is a default for most distributions but a person that does install on Raspberry Pi might be configuring filesystem manually and not be aware to put it there.

Swap is very tempting to have on the Pi but is going to kill the card in a hurry.

Eventually sounds like far far away In reality, they really have short lifespan, are slow, and halt the system

Therefore I wouldn’t recommend the rpi anymore.

The whole point of my post is to suggest that it's now easy (soon even easier when it's not a beta feature) to run everything from a durable external SSD. You don't even need a microSD card inserted anymore.

Ideally the next Pi gets some interface that allows more integrated storage, like eMMC or NVMe, but even with USB the speed and durability justifies annoying cabling situations.

the lifespan is mostly due to writes, right? so couldn't you just boot from an SD card but save your actual data on an external drive?

Yes, I have several pis that boot from an sd card and then all of the file systems get mounted over NFS. The sd card only needs to be read from once every few weeks/months when it boots.

Even if it does wear out, storing all the data on NFS (or a usb drive) makes it a lot less worrying.

note this worked on all the previous models of the pi. It just wasn't ready for the pi 4 when it shipped.