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I have a great deal of experience with this, and I'd highly recommend against it.

First of all, the endurance of USB drivers is very poor; most retail flash drives are designed for light weight storage of files with occasional updates and accesses, not the continuous hammering a drive gets during live OS operation. It's quite easy with continuous live OS operation to "burn out" a flash drive.

Secondly, typical OS configurations write to log files and update packages, etc., so the persistence space tends to fill up faster than one might expect.

Both of these are less of an issue with external hard drives connected over USB, either spinny disks or SSDs. But at that point you can do a full OS install onto the external disk and boot from that rather than using a live distribution. I've done this and it works well, though the USB speed becomes a big limitation.

There are other solutions that involve more work such as virtualization (running either linux as a VM on Windows, the reverse, or full virtual environments like #proxmox), but require more technical knowledge and administration.

ABH3PO 1y ago

can I do a full install on an external.hard disk without having to make persistent changes on the BIOS?

also can I make it plug and playable between supporting machines?

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Discussion

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

To the first question, yes, it should not require bios changes to boot from an external device if you’ve already successfully done that before.

To the second question, I think that will depend a great deal on distro you install. Most I would expect are not going to play well with being booted into a different machine, because during installation and updates etc., it will install the appropriate drivers for that specific machine.

Contrast this with live bootable distros, which are designed to be used on a variety of hardware at boot time.

ABH3PO 1y ago

ahh overlooked the drivers, make sense, I guess installing Linux on an external drive will be the way I go ahead with this.

jimbocoin 🃏 1y ago

Adding another internal drive is still something worth considering, IMO.

Johnathan Corgan 1y ago

Hmm, yeah, hadn't considered that.

Johnathan Corgan 1y ago

Yes, mostly. You get some challenges with booting, however. Some machines allow you to interrupt boot up and select an alternative boot drive, while others (particularly Windows-based) want to own the machine and make it more difficult to do so. I don't have a great deal of experience with Windows and it might have gotten easier in more recent versions to do this.

Regarding portability, Linux distributions handle changing the hardware out from underneath them pretty well, but things like hardware device names etc. changing might disrupt some configurations.

Absent more complex solutions like virtualization, dual-booting is typically the easiest and best option. Then one day you stop booting into Windows are are free 😏

ABH3PO 1y ago

wish you had a lightning address setup, thanks so much for the help! ❤

Johnathan Corgan 1y ago

Yeah, you're not the first to say that. I'll get around to it someday.