We’ve lost two this week

“just” setting that up takes much longer than installing a small app to do it.

Or gnome disks, which also adds an “open with ‘write to drive’” option to isos and images

dd status=progress can also tell you how far along the operation is.

I use Arch btw

That’s definitely not true, Raspberry Pi OS works and acts like a normal Debian installation per default - with root mounted rw and all.

Other than that, there isn’t much “treating like an HDD/SSD” going on, it just writes to flash when an application requests it does. If the underlying storage is an eeprom, an sdcard nvme storage doesn’t really change anything here.

Most SD cards aren’t really suitable for the kind of workload an operating system generates (that being mostly random i/o). Make sure to get a reputable A2 (application class 2) rated card, they aren’t that expensive but perform way better.

Raspberry Pi themselves launched a card recently, I haven’t tried that one but it’s probably a good choice too.