Hello! The TL;DR is:
I have an m.2 drive that is in a sturdy enclosure that has 1 TB. I have Ventoy with Medicat on there, with some backups of important data.
I still have a lot of room left on there, so I was thinking what else I could do, and the idea of basically installing a Linux Distro to a chunk of free space on there. Maybe Debian/Fedora or Arch.
Is there anything I should be aware of to help not break that system or rapidly kill the drive? It’s not a USB flash drive, it’s a M.2 drive that’s put on a small board that then allows it to talk via USB C/Thunderbolt.
EDIT: Just to be sure, if I use Ventoy’s EFI, do I need to be worried about a conflict with the bootloader of the Linux install?
But it’s not a usb stick, it’s an m.2 drive in an enclosure… So your second point doesn’t apply
It indeed doesn’t, its purpose is to show the differences and clarify why/where OP might have heard you need special care for portable installs on USB sticks.
All the guides and tutorials out there are overwhelmingly written with regular USB sticks in mind and not M.2 enclosures over USB. So they’ll tell you to put as much stuff on tmpfs as possible and avoid all unnecessary reads and writes.