Maybe I’m misunderstanding the purpose or goal but wouldn’t this be perfect use case for a virtual machine? I’m surprised no one has suggested that. A one off temporary, easily reverted back to pristine with snapshots sounds like exactly what you would want for testing something like this out.

Install an OS on the card to boot from? Its the same process as making a bootable live USB stick.

The performance will be poor in comparison to an SSD and will reduce the longevity of the card due to many r/w operations.

Short answer: yes, you absolutely can.

But there are a lot of caveats (I did that with a usb stick): you need a light distro, ubuntu server in a nimble installation can work with that but if your server expands (like mine does) you will start to get a hard time.

So long answer: you probably shouldn’t do it if you can avoid it.

So there’s 2 things, I think.

1. Does your bios allow you to boot from SD card? If so, then you can boot from the SD card and so you can install software onto the SD card directly.

2. If you can’t boot off of the SD card, then perhaps you can install all the software on the SD card and then install a boot manager on the main drive. In this way, you boot off the main drive, then let the boot manager deal with loading the software.

You might be disappointed by the performance of software running off an SD card, mind you.

You understand that when you install it on the SD card and want to run it, then windows will not run at the same time, yes?

The other option would be a Virtual machine like someone else suggested.

Yes our servers running esxi boot from an SD card

But. That’s not to say you won’t have issues.

As others are saying distro matters

Not exactly the answer for the question you ask but you mention yunohost… i recently installed it and it was impossible from their iso. Install debian first and then use it to install yunohost there