So I have been having issues with the Particle keys and I have 4 Photons that have never been used and are unusable. I have been having issues getting the cloud to doctor them aswell. So I have a suggestion to end these kinds of problems.
Particle OS.
A distribution for either X86/X64 and/or ARM(Raspberry Pi) of Debain/Raspbian with Node/Particle/Git/DFU and anything else Particle related installed and on an update list so you just type sudo apt-get update && upgrade when you want to update it.
It could be a Debian iso image (possibly live CD) or a Raspberry Pi SD image.
I think it would make supporting them much easier and it would prevent having issues with “open source” problems IE someone changes something and the whole world breaks.