Completely agree. I jumped back in recently for some electronics work and was surprised to learn that the Raspberry Pi imaging tool allows you to set the root user, WiFi SSID, and hostname right when you're imaging the tool. You never need to connect it to a display like the old days! Makes onboarding a device for a specific purpose super easy. Been using mine to work with a simple LED matrix from Adafruit. But I am sure I will be acquiring more for all kinds of random projects in the time to come.
tzs|5 months ago
It does indeed make setting up a headless RPi quite convenient, although afterwards you do actually have to find the thing on your network.
By default it has the hostname "raspberrypi" and handles mDNS so SSHing to raspberrypi.local often does the trick, but could be a problem if you have more than one. You can set the hostname in the imager to deal with that.
Another common approach is to check your router's DHCP client list or connected device list. If you are lucky your router includes the hostname if the client sent one. If it only shows MAC address, IP address, and DHCP remaining lease you can look for something that just got its lease.
Personally, once I learn the Pi's MAC addresses either from my router's DHCP server or by logging on to the Pi and using "ip link show" I go to my router's DHCP settings and assign reserved IP addresses to those Mac addresses. Then whenever I re-image or boot from another drive with a different image it doesn't matter. It's going to be on the same IP.