Ventoy + as many ISOs as you want
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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This. Even if I don't see a purpose to go anything beyond Armbian + Debian + "prebuilt" Manjaro.
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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/
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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.
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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.
Wow Bunsenlabs. Now that’s a distro I haven’t heard in a while. lol. I used to have it on an old laptop many many years ago.
I loved Crunchbang was sad to see it go
I've tried so many others out and I keep going back to it! I put it on everything haha.
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.
Solid consumer advice
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
Maybe MX linux or AntiX Linux. They are very thumb drive focused
Check out the Immutable Versions of Fedora (Kinonite and Silverblue especially)
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!
Almost any Linux distribution would fit that purpose
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)..
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