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.
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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?
somehow no one said puppy linux. it’s small, fast and functional. there is an compatible debian version here - https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/
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!
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.
That’s what I use tails for. Persistent storage for files and software make it really convinient to travel around with.
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.
Almost any Linux distribution would fit that purpose
Mint works pretty well as a persistent flash drive distro, the packages are a bit outdated though if you’re going to do a lot of programming
Check out the Immutable Versions of Fedora (Kinonite and Silverblue especially)
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.
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!
Tails!
Although I think tails is great, this isn’t the ideal use case
If you’re using the flash drive as a block storage device with a root partition, I think just about any distribution would fit your requirements. Just try experimenting with it and make sure that both your machines can boot into the flash drive.
Ok, thanks. I just wasn’t sure if there were compatibility or stability issues with certain distros from switching machines so much.
The only trade off here is that read/write operations are going to be throttled by the speed of your flash drive which will be very noticeable compared to NVME internal storage.
The only trade off here is that read/write operations are going to be throttled
I agree with this, definitely noticeable with FD and maybe the better solution imo is buy SSD SATA 128gb, installed Ventoy on that, move all your ISO linux to Ventoy, and you can boot all Linux in one page without any flashing one by one again.
Very convinient, less effort, and more flexible according to your needs in instant. Start with FD 64gb is fine (as I started from that too), but in the end, I need to buy external SSD for not compromise the speed and storage (minus the size though than FD)…
There might need to be some extra firmware packages which need to new installed, but they’re shouldn’t be any problems from switching hardware.
