@dos2unix Okay, there's a lot of bad information and flat-out wrong things in your post. There's many different options when it comes to loading into RAM and how and when you save. It's not the same as a liveUSB.
1. booting slower - not that noticeable on frugal installs I've worked with. Mostly Puppy Linux, but I do have a frugal install of MX Linux which loads entirely into RAM now. Even from a USB 3.0 w/ about 100 mb/s read speed it's really not a big deal. The WRITE speed is what gets you. The saves can take a bit, especially if you're doing it on a USB. Even USB 3.0's can have write speeds under 10mb/s and when you make a save it will take a few minutes. On a 3,000mb/s gen 3 nvme however the saves are a few seconds.
2. Yes, some distros don't make sense for this. The idea when specifying I have 32G of RAM was to point that out, and I'm also interested as proof of concept of what Linux might work for someone with 16G, that's what I'm trying to find out with my frugal install of MX Linux loading into RAM right now.
3. Re-download latest software - wrong. You can write the changes to disk any time you want, and frankly I think having the option to NOT write the changes to disk is fantastic. Just the other day upgrading the kernel went horribly wrong due to a bug that conflicts with NVIDIA. In a normal installation you have a mess, but with it loaded into RAM you just reboot without saving and that mess is gone. But if the upgrade goes well you just do a save and write it to disk, or save whenever you reboot or poweroff.
4. Yah, it's not for everyone. Especially your crazy ass with 1,000 apps going at once, 20 VM's, and A/V production. lol. Why are you even commenting here? That should have gone without saying that this is not the way for you. Did you seriously think someone was proposing you should try to load a massive OS into RAM and run a bunch of VM's while doing A/V production with 1,000 tabs open on 10 different browsers???!! LMAO. I don't keep a lot of apps going at once, but I do do a bit of A/V production and I don't know if this is even gonna be the OS for that. It might be that I won't put those apps and additional packages on this. Let's just get some browsers, office software and a few things first and see where we're at. I'm gonna get my conky going to monitor RAM use with a simple gauge and sort of figure out with this experimental MX Linux install exactly how much or little in terms of apps and so forth it wants to do.
5. The plan is to fstab folders ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Videos to a different partition. It turns out MX Linux has a nice GUI for that, but doing it manually isn't that hard either. I'm arguably in BETTER shape for a power outage than you are when it comes to saving files, and my files are also safe from a complete OS failure, your's aren't. Linux now has an experimental feature where you can fstab a folder on a partition which makes this an even better option. You should consider it even if you have a normal file directory install. Since you clearly care about keeping your files safe a lot.
