I recently learned that you can make many apps such as browsers portable on a USB drive and I was wondering, aside from being able to take it on the go, what other advantages does portable apps have? I know it won’t take up much storage. Is there any privacy benefits?
Installation restriction at work. You may have rights to execute .exe but not to install app.
I also have a dozen of utility app I daily use (image viewer, PDF viewer, process killer, inkscape, gimp, etc…). I just have to zip my progs folder to backup and I won’t need to reinstall everything if my computer die (which happened last month BTW).
I like it when an app seems a little bit poorly made, I can just try it out and when it doesn’t work I can simply delete it. Much better than installing it with some random shell script or handmade package file. You never know if installing won’t fuck up something or uninstalling it leaves stuff behind or removes stuff is shouldn’t.
There’s a few apps I use once in a blue moon to convert some files, they all sit in one little folder not hurting anything till I need them. That folder is pretty old and has moved multiple systems, but they still work great for what they do.
I’ve only seen it used to play games on school / public computers. The game runs from the USB, since the user doesn’t have permission to install software on the computer’s harddrive.
I’ve seen them used less for privacy and more for getting around permissions/limitations on controlled systems like work laptops. (That’s assuming work devices haven’t locked down or disabled USB drives.)
More often than not, there will still be some artifacts left over, whether it’s recently access files or terminal history that indicates a portable device/app was used.
If you’re looking at USB things specifically designed for privacy, something like Tails is where it’s at.
Privacy benefits would vary with different apps - you’d need to really dig into that.
Any purported benefits might stop mum from checking your browsing history but wouldn’t stop a determined attacker, although they would likely need to have things in place to monitor you before you showed up with your USB drive.
I can’t really think of what the practical benefits actually might be?
It might feel private, and it might even feel convenient in some cases, but as a general practice it seems like a whole lot of horsing around for very little benefit.
