[blackfawn]

I like using Alpine for read-only operation on the Pi right out of the box: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

[GianFabien]

Alpine has been great for me too.

Use an USB Flash drive mounted as a R/W filesystem for logs, etc. fsck can usually recover those f/s when crashed. The root f/s remains intact.

[seemaze]

This is the way. Run from ram and an excellent selection of packages to boot! I have a number of pi zero and pi 2 zero running alpine.