Right. It’s optional so that Bash remains backwards compatible as a superset of POSIX sh. If you’re working with exclusively Bash, though, it’s nice to use as syntactic sugar if nothing else.

Bash (specifically Bash, not POSIX sh) does have a keyword for functions (function), but it’s optional.

It sounds like you’ve found your ideal distro. Great! Not everyone will have the same exact use case for their Pi’s.

I’m just a little disgruntled because I like treating my Pi’s as headless servers, often with a single purpose, and I don’t want to have to erase the SD cards to upgrade versions.

That’s very fair. Everyone has a different use for Pi’s, and I just happen to favor long-lived devices that can be updated easily. I wish more of the pi internals were upstreamed too.

The devs have started releasing 64-bit builds since then, yes. However, they still push people to the 32-bit builds: https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

I understand their thinking. They want a unified build experience, to simplify their development and user experience.

I believe you may have found your ideal OS. Debian will always lag behind ever so often. And that’s okay. We all use the Pi’s for different reasons.

This is probably a hot take, but:

I disagree. The OS doesn’t run a mainline kernel, and the Raspberry Pi devs recommend a clean slate on OS upgrades. Granted, they do some trickery for performance with their Zero (not 2) line, using armhf instead of the slower armel, but this doesn’t excuse the fact that Raspberry Pi OS is so brittle. The builds are also still on 32-bit, even though every Pi since 3B can run 64-bit OSes.

I just run Debian on mine. Can’t be assed to clean flash my devices each major update.

If you’re using git to version Caddy configuration, you can use a pre-commit hook to test it, ensuring that you’ll never have invalid configuration. That’s what I do.

caddy validate

There’s some extra command args that may be necessary but that should be an adequate first step.