If an unmodified sdcard image doesn’t survive an apt-get upgrade that’s definitely a bug we want to fix, we don’t want to discourage updating for security fixes (even if the attack surface of a piaware is fairly small)
This is the key sentence from your post: “If an unmodified sdcard image…”.
I get confused sometimes because people are not clear on how they build their feeders. The Piaware image is the best method, period.
Building the feeder on top of pre-existing Raspbian installations is much harder to support. The RPi may be doing many other tasks, unrelated to the ‘caring and feeding’ of an FA account.
Bits is bits, no matter how they get there. The advantages and/or disadvantages of open source are beyond the scope of this thread.
Imagine not having to tell people to do the step-2 verify. Imagine people not forgetting to do step-2 or getting in a hurry to boot their new project and intentionally skipping step-2. in Etcher default configuration, writes get verified every time with no user interaction.
Correct, back to the topic. Does it improve image writing?
I use Etcher, and disabled image verification. Never ran into a problem for doing so.
I understand why the default configuration has it enabled. Everything must cater to the lowest common denominator these days. To ask people to read instructions, and/or ‘play’ with the software settings, is tantamount to offending their mother’s lineage..