Image files for Pimatic useful?

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I was just wondering if it could be useful to have a ready made image file for raspberry pi or maybe banana pi etc.
For beginners it would be easier to install an image to a sd card and use it instead of installing linux first and then pimatic via command line.
also a ready made image has the advantage that the common plugins are already installed and ready for use. there won’t be so much installation steps anymore. it’s already compiled and ready to use. for raspberry pi this should work, since their hardware is almost the same.
sure, an image is never up to date, but for this, pimatic has the update function implemented.

what do you think of that?

Thought about this in the beginning and I think its a bad idea:

• Custom installation has the advantage that you know where your things are and how you can fix them if they don’t work anymore.
• Since most plugins would have to be updated anyway it does not make much sense.
• It does not fix the real problem: npm runs slow and unreliable on the rpi.

I think we should try to make plugin / framework installation and update less painful instead.

There are two things we really need:

• reliable update: Backup before updating package, so if it fails you are not left alone with a non working system. npm will hopefully get rollback support soon. So hopefully this will be fixed by npm.
• npm modules with native source should ship with precompiled binaries for the rpi. Maybe repack them our own so that all dependencies are included. I think this would solve a lot of trouble. The best would be to have some script that repacks plugins with precompiled binaries for arm. Then updating a plugin would just be downloading it and unpacking. The problem is that I didn’t manage to get cross compiling of npm modules working. So if someone wants to investigate in this direction it would be cool.

OK, fully agreeing with your arguments!
Thanks for your explanation!