So if I have my Desktop at home, my personal laptop, and my laptop I use for work/business trips, can I have my own personal Linux setup on a portable drive that I can plug into and boot into from any of my devices? Like a cloud Linux setup, but I’m the cloud. Fear my cumulonimbus rumbles!
Don’t use USB stick, it has really awful random read / write performance. I recommend fast SSD with cache. I tried USB stick solution several years ago and it was so laggy it was unusable
Yes, definitely SSD is better but not as small as a little USB drive – depends what you ultimately want :)
I inherited a crappy laptop (4 core atom processor, with 4 gigs of RAM, fear the power!) because Windows was running slow on it. I decided to try different Linux distros booting from a USB and had no issues. I literally ran the system for months off of a Sandisk USB drive, and it was faster than the spindle drive in the machine.
My recommendation is, don’t cheap out on the USB drive. No-name drives are fine for word files, but the performance increase from a Sandisk, Samsung, Kingston or equivalent is worth it for any media transfers and will work fine for a bootable Linux.
A good workaround for this is to add
toramto your kernel command line. This loads the whole image into RAM before booting, which speeds things up dramatically at the expense of using more of your RAM while idle.