Linux Distro For Use On A Flash Drive
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.
Do yourself a favor and get an external hard drive. You'll get much better results and can run almost any distro with it.
Definitely this.
I gave up on thumb drives as they are kind of trash. External NVMe drives are affordable, and the speed difference is BIG.
Even better get a NVMe enclosure and an internal NVMe drive.
Enclosures are $20 and you can get a 500gb Samsung 970 Evo for $35.
Smaller, lighter, cheaper and faster than any off the shelf portable drive you could get. I have one and it fully saturates the USB C 10Gbit port on my motherboard.
somehow no one said puppy linux. it's small, fast and functional. there is an compatible debian version here - https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/
I use puppy Linux all the time. Works great, on a fairly crappy USB stick. It saves files to the stick and saves user preferences and everything. Very recommended from my end.
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!
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.
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.
Bunsenlabs is Debian-based, but doesn't have a classic desktop environment. Instead it uses super lightweight Openbox window manager and some other tricks to emulate one. It will run very well with 20gb disk space (you have triple that at your disposal). If you remove the programs you don't use (the office suite, etc etc) you can trim the install down even more.
Very helpful, thank you. I will definitely give this a try!
No worries. It's been my daily driver for a very long time at this point across many different machines. If you do go with Bunsen, it's still on Debian 11. You can safely do an apt dist-upgrade to 12 and it will keep the Bunsenlabs flavor without issue. I often run Sid repo as well, no issues for me.
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!
Maybe MX linux or AntiX Linux. They are very thumb drive focused
Never really got manjaro, never got around to it on my distro hopping spree.
Isn't it just arch underneath?
Would have been funny if they forgot to renew theyr ssl cert
somebody snapshotted it on Github – Manjarno
Tails!
Although I think tails is great, this isn't the ideal use case
I've always used Xubuntu. It's reasonably lightweight and the Ubuntu USB creator does the heavy lifting for creating persistence. The only downside is you have to have a running instance an Ubuntu flavor (bare metal, VM or USB) to use the tool.
I'll probably just flash to one drive and install to the other. Thanks for the tip though!
Check out the Immutable Versions of Fedora (Kinonite and Silverblue especially)
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.
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.
Almost any Linux distribution would fit that purpose
Honestly I'd go with something that supports booting in secure boot mode like fedora or Ubuntu(direct derivatives maybe). And yes, install to am external drive if you plan on having persistence.
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
Alpine works great off a usb, I run sway and quite a few other bits off it on a run-from-ram/encrypted config.
Ventoy + as many ISOs as you want
This. Even if I don't see a purpose to go anything beyond Armbian + Debian + "prebuilt" Manjaro.
Interesting! But will changes made to the OS you're using be persistent? If I'm reading this right, then probably not, right?
correct – you can save individual files to the USB stick but anything like UI customization will be lost
There are ways, but it's not standard.
You can you will have to set somethings up for it.
They're looking for a persistent install on a flash drive. To my knowledge it’s not easy to make ventoy do that.