The question came up recently about a good way to install a Ubuntu Core system on devices that have internal drives (like e.g. the Intel NUC) instead of the sdcards that are common on the pi2/pi3. With the pi2/pi3 the usual way is to simply dd the ubuntu-core image to the sdcard and put it in.
An easy way to install Ubuntu Core on such devices is to boot a 18.04 live usb stick and then use the go-dd snap to write the image directly from the network:
# needs devmode because it may need to write to arbitrary block devices
$ sudo snap install --devmode --beta godd
# replace /dev/sda with the block device you need, godd will refuse to write to mounted devices
$ sudo godd if=http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/16/stable/current/ubuntu-core-16-amd64.img.xz of=/dev/sda
If the above is a common use-case we could easily wrap this into a more user friendly “installer” that e.g. auto-detects the available block devices and picks the right architecture etc.