You might enjoy an operating system that operates fully in RAM. I’ve used picore (a modified tinycore Linux) and it’s nice. It lets you chose when to write to the SD card. Everything else happens quickly.
I think there are some more distros with larger ecosystems that use just RAM, but picore has met my needs and is a piece of cake to set up.
Easy OS installation and experimentation by swapping SD cards is a neat feature made possible by this design choice. You can improve durability by underprovisioning - SD card of 64 GB capacity costs a dozen euros or so. Judging by the popularity, RPi isn't generally seen as pointless but certainly it's not the best option for every application.
> I would prefer to have 1GB of quality flash memory and a slow CPU rather than use SD cards.
> Why can't they even add 64MB of flash memory to store a bit of user data?
What you're describing is a pretty niche requirement, as 1GB isn't enough to store much of anything these days (and 64MB?). They do make the Compute Module, which is available with 8, 16, or 32 GB of onboard storage.
> I can disable writing on a SD card to improve its lifespan, but honestly the RPi is pointless if there is no durable way to store data on it.
A quality portable SSD attached via USB (and not relying on a SATA dongle) works great. A good one will cost you at least as much as the Pi board itself, which sometimes rubs people the wrong way.
I log to tmpfs, use sane filesystem that was designed for flash storage (ie tries to reduce write amplification effects), and most of my uSD cards already clock >5years with frequently updated arch linux arm running on them the whole time + services they are meant for.
Looking at stats, my SBCs take between 9-30 GiB of writes a month. So that's already 1-2TiBs of total writes. That doesn't sound like much. Like 30-60 total overwrites of the SD card. I'd expect the card to take 200-500 complete overwrites.
Basically infinite lifetime with this amount of write load. PSU will probably stop working before the SD cards will.
Why can't they even add 64MB of flash memory to store a bit of user data? That can't be expensive, or maybe I don't know how electronics work?
I can disable writing on a SD card to improve its lifespan, but honestly the RPi is pointless if there is no durable way to store data on it.
I love the concept of the RPi, but this is a major flaw and it's still not fixed.