It's more than just simple, it's raw. In most Linux distros you can loop mount a dd image directly from the GUI file manager by simply right clicking the file, no CLI required. And you can write the image using standard GUI tools like gnome-disk-utility.
What I do when imaging my SD cards is put it in my Linux laptop and use gparted to shrink the last partition on the disk. I then use gparted again to get the last sector number of the last partition and add one to it (for sector zero.) Pass this number to dd as a count= parameter and you wont have to image the unallocated space at the end. If you want to gz the img output file you can also cat /dev/zero > zerofile then delete that file to zero the free space in your shrunk partition. That should help improve your compression ratio.
Of course I only do this for my "clean" initial/base image. Backing up files in /home dir after that is usually as that's needed for me but you might need more than that.
What I do when imaging my SD cards is put it in my Linux laptop and use gparted to shrink the last partition on the disk. I then use gparted again to get the last sector number of the last partition and add one to it (for sector zero.) Pass this number to dd as a count= parameter and you wont have to image the unallocated space at the end. If you want to gz the img output file you can also cat /dev/zero > zerofile then delete that file to zero the free space in your shrunk partition. That should help improve your compression ratio.
Of course I only do this for my "clean" initial/base image. Backing up files in /home dir after that is usually as that's needed for me but you might need more than that.