I use a Framework. I would advise looking up the parts you select prior to ordering. I didn't, and I accidentally selected an SSD that has known firmware issues (it unmounts itself randomly while in use). No fixes for this issue in 2 years has me skeptical of buying again, but I'm otherwise pretty happy with the device.
I'm not joking. I used to be an Alpine user, but I ran it in disk mode. Any OS can probably be made to boot to RAM. You just need to get the initramfs to extract a rootfs image to RAM (tmpfs), and set that filesystem as root before handing off to init. What makes Puppy special is the stuff it does to persist changes.
Preventing the issue from ocurring by not selling a known incompatible configuration is the approach I'd take personally. It's the combination of the 512GB WD Black and the i5.
I was already considering buying the SSD and RAM myself, so that's good to know.
This sounds like a similar issue I've had with my own computer. I assumed the problem was that the board is form 4th gen intel, DDR3 RAM, and it definitely doesn't support an EVO 970 since it's from ~2014. I had to put the bootloader on another drive to avoid this. Not a very pretty solution, but it still works!
