[berti]

Even if you couldn't mount the boot partition on any common desktop OS and setup ssh + wpa_supplicant (it's FAT32), I would greatly prefer the simplicity of a local console session with a $2 USB-serial adapter (am I the only weirdo with dozens of these lying around?).

Typically I actually just mount the partitions and chroot with qemu-arm, upgrade packages, and do all of the setup before the SD card is ever inserted in a real Pi. proot[0] makes all this a walk in the park.

  mount /dev/sdX2 /mnt
  mount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/boot
  proot -q qemu-arm -S /mnt

[0] https://proot-me.github.io