So if I have my Desktop at home, my personal laptop, and my laptop I use for work/business trips, can I have my own personal Linux setup on a portable drive that I can plug into and boot into from any of my devices? Like a cloud Linux setup, but I’m the cloud. Fear my cumulonimbus rumbles!
I can’t name specific solutions off the top of my head as I haven’t done it in a while, but Yes. There are many live distros that offer an optional ‘overlayFS’ (I think that’s the right term) which reserves some of your portable drive’s storage for persistent changes to apply over the base live FS.
Combine that with git and/or NextCloud or an SSH file mount or three and you could probably come up with a complete mobile setup that also has quick access to whatever home server infrastructure you need. 128GB or 256GB USB sticks are pretty cheap now which is plenty for a spacious install. Or even a small USB SSD.
Don’t use USB stick, it has really awful random read / write performance. I recommend fast SSD with cache. I tried USB stick solution several years ago and it was so laggy it was unusable
Yes, definitely SSD is better but not as small as a little USB drive – depends what you ultimately want :)
I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.
My recommendation is, don’t cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.
A good workaround for this is to add
toramto your kernel command line. This loads the whole image into RAM before booting, which speeds things up dramatically at the expense of using more of your RAM while idle.