This is exactly what I was trying to do a few months ago, but all the RPi VMs I found were a pain in the ass and I never got it to work. Ansible deployments are

This is exactly what I was trying to do a few months ago, but all the RPi VMs I found were a pain in the ass and I never got it to work. Ansible deployments are conveniently but take forever on RPi, golden images are great for distribution but suck to make. Using Ansible to deploy to a VM and then exporting that image for flashing is the best of both approaches.