Did you ever want to flash your root partition straight to USB stick/HDD/SDD instead of first dd-ing it onto SD Card and then coping it again onto another media?

I got bored of the double work that is provided by RPi geeks. Yeah, it’s fine if you’re a total beginner (though one might get lost pretty easily) and want to use only the SD Card. But what if you know how to deal with Raspberry Pi already and perform the card setup mechanically, coping the root partition to a USB stick before you run the system? There is an easy way to do it, less time consuming and faster. It involves using loop-mounting partitions from a disk image.

Full article here:
Alternative way to flash your Raspberry Pi OS (The Unwritten Words)