Here’s the basics of my set up for what I can bring around:
- A Crucial 1TB M.2 Drive
- A M.2 Drive Enclosure that has USB 3.1 Gen 2 output So with these together are desktop performance in a small thing. It is not a flash drive that just gets ruined in like 3 months of constant use.
And with these, I use a Ventoy set up called Medicat. I love it, and there’s no issue with it for me, besides that Medicat/Microsoft requires NTFS for Windows stuff. Aside from standard NTFS bullshit, it’s wonderful.
Since I have so much space, I had the idea of storing a Linux set up for on the go use on any laptop/computer without needing to sign into 10 websites for one time use. Here’s my two methods of how to do it:
- Make a persistent data block for Fedora/Ubuntu/etc. and make a Live ISO point to it, then boot from Ventoy into the ISO, which then handles mounting the “drive”.
- Clear a space on the drive, install a distro like Fedora/Debian and encrypt it, allowing me to just run
apt upgrade
and move on like a normal PC.
Here’s the upsides and downsides to both that I can see, just thinking about it.
Persistence:
- ✅ Don’t need to fuck with partitions of NTFS, last time I tried to shrink the drive NTFS had a breakdown and I couldn’t fix it.
- ✅ Can expand the persistence as time goes on
- ❌ NTFS constantly has issues with me, where I can cleanly eject the drive but I need to run
ntfsfix
to make it work again, and I don’t know when that will happen in the future. - ❓ Not sure how it will go with Arch Linux, but that might be a bad choice for a drive I boot into for fun/infrequently.
Partition and full install:
- ✅ Easier to just get going, point an ISO to install there and good to go.
- ✅ Easier to upgrade to new packages/editions, instead of downloading new ISOs and pointing it each time. I’m unsure if it would let me use a .dat file from Fedora 36 for Fedora 40, for example.
- ✅ I can encrypt it so I don’t need to worry about people nabbing it and messing with personal files.
- ✅ I can use something like ext4 or btrfs, so I don’t need to rely on NTFS.
- ❌ Trying to resize NTFS was really fucky, and felt like I was breaking something. I did break it, and had to reinstall Medicat/Ventoy.
- ❓ I’m unsure of how to boot from it and keep Medicat/Ventoy as the main option. Maybe create a file on Ventoy to boot the distro? Maybe it varies from BIOS to BIOS?
Wanting to hear the thoughts from people smarter than me, maybe have done this before. I just want to make it clear It’s not a USB flash drive, this won’t break randomly from one too many R/Ws.
Are you committed to using a physical external drive?
I personally came to the solution for a portable workspace by setting up a Guacamole server, Guacamole is a HTML5 based remote desktop interface. I personally have a proxmox server and have Guac hooked into various VMs so I can access anything from any browser on any HTML5 capable device.
It’s actually really nice for even at home use, I have a couple Windows VMs each setup for specific use cases, like one of them is setup as my Visual Studio development workspace or switch to my totally-not-macos-that-would-be-a-eula-violation VM for not-mac stuff lol
I use proxmox, but Guac handles quite a few different remote desktop protocols, so you could hook it into an always running desktop/laptop or something if you want to keep things a little simpler
But that might be a little more involved than you were thinking with your original idea lol
That’s way more work that I’m thinking of, plus my home internet isn’t good enough for any outside server use, and I don’t have the cash for a server hosted somewhere. Thank you however!