> Nobody wants a 20s boot every time you want to take a picture
But that's less due to the RPi and more due to lots of amateur projects that ship the RPi with a desktop Linux distribution like Raspbian (itself based on a very conservative one - Debian - that loves preserving decades of legacy crap).
You can absolutely get quick boot times on an RPi (or on an x86 machine for that matter, although you are limited by the time the firmware itself takes to boot) if you build your own read-only image with Buildroot/Yocto like any embedded shop would.
But I agree with the rest of the comment - an RPi is a terrible device for this (and for most purposes besides prototyping in fact). But not because of boot time reasons.
But that's less due to the RPi and more due to lots of amateur projects that ship the RPi with a desktop Linux distribution like Raspbian (itself based on a very conservative one - Debian - that loves preserving decades of legacy crap).
You can absolutely get quick boot times on an RPi (or on an x86 machine for that matter, although you are limited by the time the firmware itself takes to boot) if you build your own read-only image with Buildroot/Yocto like any embedded shop would.
But I agree with the rest of the comment - an RPi is a terrible device for this (and for most purposes besides prototyping in fact). But not because of boot time reasons.