has anyone here tried using Linux as a daily driver from a live usb (with persistence enabled) ? is it a feasible alternative to dual booting? (wish to get rid of windows but can't because of games and vr stuff)
#asknostr
Discussion
Just switch. Most games work with proton in Steam.
I understand, I want to try for some time before I actually make the switch, i am not sure about VR compatibility I don't think oculus link works, steam VRworks should work which might be enough.
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.
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?
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.
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 😏
Have you tried Proton on Linux? Checkout https://www.protondb.com/ for games compatibility. The coverage is pretty darn good, e.g. Cyberpunk runs pretty smoothly. Where you'll hit a hurdle is anti cheats, but that's spyware anyway, people should stay away from them.
don't care for anticheat, main concern is VR library
Ah, haven't tried with VR. Just try it, I guess it will depend on driver support. I generally don't touch proprietary drivers (so no NVidia), but for VR NVidia could be better.
If I may add, dual booting, or live USB to switch to Linux rarely leads to success. If you are serious about switching, you need to commit to it. I used to dual boot for a long time, but I never really committed, around about 15 yrs ago I just went "wth, let's go for it, I'll learn stuff", and never looked back.
I would also say don't try lots of distros trying to find the perfect one. Just pick a mainstream distro, and go with it. I hear Mint or Pop_OS are good for starters. If you are a bit techy, you could try Fedora (that's what I use).
Good luck 🤞🏾