Great this straightens my head I will give it another go with one of those machines.
I’m thinking of replacing the whole windows installation with Tails, so I don’t have to run it from a USB device.
Am I doing this right?
Discussion
That's not how it works. What are you trying to gain?
I just want to run tails on a laptop. My MacBook doesn’t let me boot from usb. So I need to use some other machine.
Then suddenly I thought why not create a dedicated tails-laptop. Just Tails, nothing else.
You'll need different hardware. Have you heard of Qubes?
I just read some of their website. Looks pretty cool too. Maybe I’ll go try running that on my spare laptop.
Would the security be comparable to tails?
It's way better. You can create VMs with different permissions. You might create a Tor only Debian VM template. Install the apps you only need so there's no bloat. You can keep a version with persistent storage or not.