I just came across my old Raspberry Pi 3B. It used to be my HomeAssistant server until I found out that SD cards are wholly unsuited for constant writing. Then it was my Octoprint server until my eyes ragequit. I don't want to get rid of it, but between all my other computers, I don't really know what to do with the thing. Like, I could throw Gentoo on it, but what would I even do afterward? Anybody have ideas for a project the Pi is well suited for? I don't do soldering since I'm blind, so it'd have to be something wholly software-based or use hardware that can be attached easily. Also how do I boot off of something that's not an SD card? Losing my root partition due to a power failure is one of the main reasons I stopped using it

@PepperTheVixen There are some SD cards that do work well with constant writing. But regardless, there are ways to install Raspian on a flash friendly filesystem like YAFFS2, UBIFS or F2FS. There's a project to create a raspbian F2FS image but it only works with an older version (link below). Another option is to handle that manually. And a third option and probably the easiest is to just make a partition on a USB drive, copy all the contents of the root partition and put it in fstab and cmdline.txt. Using the SD card only to boot and not being touched for anything else.

https://gitlab.idleengineers.com/aaron/raspbian-f2fs

@starsider @PepperTheVixen yaffs2 and ubifs are for raw nand flash only (one without controller, which sd cards all have). i don’t think f2fs is better than ext4 on flash storage, is spite of the name. it happens to be better for write-heavy workloads on smr hard disks however

@charlotte @PepperTheVixen I see. You may be right with F2FS if the SD card has a large enough amount of always free space, assuming the SD controller does wear leveling. Which may not even be true for cheaper SD cards. YAFFS2 and UBIFS can be used on SD cards with something like block2mtd. In all cases remember that there are things like static wear leveling (moving old data blocks to more worn down areas) that most SD cards probably don't do.