School is starting up soon, and I want to install a stable distro to a 64GB flash drive that i own will remain stable while booting onto at least 2 computers (my home PC for maintenance and my School laptop for, well school).
I was thinking of just using Debian, but wasn’t sure if it would work well in terms of compatibility with my requirements.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Ventoy + as many ISOs as you want
- for Ventoy! more dynamic Linux experiences is one place and functions for one time effort…
This. Even if I don’t see a purpose to go anything beyond Armbian + Debian + “prebuilt” Manjaro.
They’re looking for a persistent install on a flash drive. To my knowledge it’s not easy to make ventoy do that.
One piece of advice I want to throw in here: Use a proper file system! exFAT or F2FS are flash-aware and will ensure that you dom’t kill your drive by frequent writes to the same memory cells!
somehow no one said puppy linux. it’s small, fast and functional. there is an compatible debian version here - https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/
It can be done. Just don’t cheap out. A USB4-attached NVMe disk will be faster than a run-of-the-mill USB 3.0 flash drive, and that will run circles around some cheap $10 USB 2.0 drive.
Not all flash drives are rated for constant use, so be sure to have a backup plan.
Other than that, it’s a cool idea! Go for it!
Do you want it to be persistent(all your stuff is saved) or you dont mind it starting fresh everytime you plug in to devices?
You could try Tails, it’s specifically made for this purpose. It’s ui is a bit old looking though, and it’s not that user friendly. If you can stand xfce or kde though, you’ll feel right at home though.
No, I meant I need a mobile workstation. Anonymity is not my primary goal here, but I will have Mullvad on.
I had the same need, and tried Tails thinking it would serve me well as a mobile workstation, but it ended up complicating things. Almost nothing is persistent.
Tails is good for other use cases.
That’s what I use tails for. Persistent storage for files and software make it really convinient to travel around with.
Tails!
Although I think tails is great, this isn’t the ideal use case
Almost any Linux distribution would fit that purpose
It’s more about your software requirements then anything else.
Stable distros can be a pain when run as a desktop, so that might need to be rethought.
OpenSuse Tumbleweed is a rolling distro which deserves a look.
Endeavor OS for something Arch based.
Debian Testing is rolling for something Debian.
Fedora is semi-rolling for something in the red hat ecosystem.
OpenSuse Leap is a stable distro which gets bumped once a year, so that might be an option.
Alpine works great off a usb, I run sway and quite a few other bits off it on a run-from-ram/encrypted config.
Mint works pretty well as a persistent flash drive distro, the packages are a bit outdated though if you’re going to do a lot of programming
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