Can I just... run it off the USB? (any downsides?)
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so I've had problems getting linux to actually setup properly but the functional preview on the boot USB stick itself works without issue, so can I just run it that way, or is that going to limit functionality in some way?
I've run systems directly from USB (installed there, not live distro) and here's the hiccups I had:
If the thumb drive is just going to be a temporary / rescue system, that's one thing. I keep several of those in my bag. But for a (semi) permanent install, you'll probably want to have it installed to a real disk.
Edit: I do have some hardware that boots its OS from a flash drive (Ubuquity router for example) but it's configured to not make a lot of writes to it and is mostly read only. So for an embedded system, a USB drive could work fine, but for a general purpose workstation, not so much.
You could install an SSD into an external enclosure and use that as a bootable USB drive.
I did that when I upgraded my M.2 to a larger size.
Yeah, you can. I had to run my file server with the OS on a USB-connected SSD for a few months since I was using all of the internal bays/connectors for the data drives (some of my re-build parts were back-ordered). OP seemed to be implying a thumb drive so I kept my experience to that.
Can you install software on it? Kernel updates etc.?
I feel it's the future, keep your data in your pocket, don't care about hardware.
Great comment!
Note that @ptz is using bits per second, so divide everything by 8 to get GB.
And, SATA is even slower than NVMe, which is increasingly common, especially in smaller form factors. So, you're looking at a potential Gen 5 NVMe 128Gbps vs USB's - let's say a USBC drive capable of handling Gen 4's maximum speed of 40Gbps. The number of Gen 4 devices - peripherals or hosts - is rather sparse. Thunderbolt 5 has been announced and will bump bandwidth to 80Gbps, but the earliest possible time we'll see those is sometime this year, and it'll be a few years before they're wide spread and peripherals are common. And if we consider the future, NVMe Gen 6 & 7 have speeds up to 256 and 512Gbps, respectively.
There's also the consideration that M.2 adoption tends to move faster than USB, so while computers are still being sold with USB 2 ports, and a maybe one or two v3, it's still pretty rare to find ones that include USB4 despite it being ratified in 2020. But as soon an a new NVMe generation is released, you start seeing more rapid adoption. I don't know why.
I'm bitter about how slowly the industry has been moving on USB4. For average users, NVMe speeds are already plenty fast - faster is better, of course, but USB3 is still laggy. Gen4, I think, is "fast enough" for most uses; it's fast enough that most people won't notice how much slower than M.2 (NMVe or SATA) it is. But it's so damned rare, and Gen4 docks are still absurdly expensive compared to Gen3 docks.
There are distros that will boot off a flashdrive, but the whole OS is loaded in RAM so you don't read/write from the drive. I know a lot of ESXi installs work the same way.
I did this for 7 years and was great. It was for work, we weren't allowed to format but the boss have me green light for this approach.
Best part is that I could just plug on my desktop and have better performance, and I didn't need to carry the laptop with me.
It was Mint, then PopOs (with some attempts of fedora).
+1 to all of this.
For ~3 years I ran a Debian system off of a raid 1 of 2 USB drives. I didn't have the spare drive bay slots in my cs24-ty and I didn't have the room for an expander.
SanDisk apparently didn't consider my use case "warranty-voiding" and were content to replace them whenever they failed. (I was honest during the first warranty inquiry about how they were used; I doubt you could get away with this with modern SanDisk though) I had a 3-year warranty on the drives, and checking my email, I replaced a total of 11 over the 3 year period. The first 7-8 were before I moved logging to a zfs dataset on the spinners, which helped a lot as those 7-8 failures were all in year 1 with the constant journaling, writing, and syncing of mostly logs.
TL/DR: great for testing if drivers and hardware work; don't do this in production
Yeah, echoing this, I've run Linux off of my external nvme enclosure for is testing as well, mitigates the heat and durability issues but was nowhere near the best experience, though it's supposed to be able to do 10 Gbps so it's nice in pinch, it's my rescue and iso drive mainly.
Standard USB keys get toasty as heck just from regular usage, especially the metal bodied ones.
Personally I view SD card installs with a similar level of concern to a USB install, had those crap out with no warning in the past (though tbf, it's only happened a handful of times), I backup configs for my stuff running off of SBCs for that reason.
Yep. There's a reason there's so many Raspberry Pi "boot from USB" how-tos.
Well, on most distros, the live image is loaded onto ram. Thus, whenever you restart, you lose everything. You could install linux on a usb, but thats incredibly slow, in my experience. If you could detail your problem, maybe we can help you fix it, instead of applying an ineffective bandage.
Live environments of most distros are not meant for long term use. You will lose all your changes on boot, since they exclusively run on RAM and don't save anything on the USB.
Now, running from USB can be done, but from my understanding, USB sticks are unreliable in the long term, since they start crapping themselves from frequent write operations. There are distros designed to run from USB, like Puppy Linux, but it does come with caveats. I'd say no, it's not worth it unless you know exactly what you're doing and why.
You can technically run Linux on a USB stick. You need to install the boot partition in the system itself not in the USB partition.
But I seriously recommend against this. I once ran ZorinOS like this back in the day, when I was testing the waters and that thing was stuttering. I ran it off a USB 3.2 stick and even then it was slow. Not to mention the heat and the damage to your USB port.
Stay away if possible.
Which distro are you using? As others have already said, you probably won't have an easy way to persistently store any data.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LiveUsbPendrivePersistent
Decent primer that should should work with whatever. I'd definitely NOT run from Flash though, and opt for an NVME drive over USB if possible. You'll kill flash storage pretty quickly like this.
If you are going to do this use MX Linux. This only stores changes so it will fill up when you install updates.
When I was first switching to Linux, I installed Arch on a USB3 stick and ran from there for a month or two. It worked pretty well, however I did seem to have issues with I/O contention. During some read and write operations and multi-tasking, the whole OS would just hang up until the operations were done. Since moving that installation to an SSD, that issue is gone. So, it does work, it's a pretty good way to "try before you buy"", but do keep in mind that performance will suffer.
At the same time, I'd definitely recommend working through the pain of getting it setup right. When you have a problem (and they will crop up), it gives you a better understanding to work from for troubleshooting. You may also want to try our different distros. I used Arch, because I hate myself. But, that may not be the right choice for someone else. Something like PopOS could be a good choice for something that is aimed more at gaming, but is supposed to "just work". Ubuntu is a good choice for a more "mainstream" look and feel. There is no good reason to do things the hard way, unless you really, really want to. The goal is to have a functional system, don't tie yourself in knots getting there.
As others say, it can be done. If you want more normal umpf, you'll need to mount parts of the filesystem to your ssd. You can mount /home or / on ssd, or have an overlay file system as a file on an ssd/hdd, or use bcachefs with back propagation to the usb, or similar fancy setups.
So you'll boot linux kernel from the usb, but most disk activity will be on your ssd. Fun project, but not super easy/practical if it isn't done automatically.
My old HP microserver is 'made' to boot from a usb-stick inserted on the mb.
Anyway, perhaps an AI can suggest a script to do what you want ?
I'd recommend trying to figure out what doesn't work right between install and liveUSB. 95% of the time in my experience that's due to non-free packages being available on the liveUSB, but not being enabled during or after install. If your issues are related to a specific component (Wi-Fi, graphics, etc.) then it's probably something that needs third-party or non-free sources enabled.
There's some sort of deal where a distro can't just install non-free drivers due to licensing without you agreeing to use them, so they add a question or option to enable those during install in order to use them. They can have them enabled in the live USB for some reason. You can also do that after install by poking around in your repository selection.
These are pretty simple things to investigate once you're used to using Linux, but certainly a bit overwhelming for someone new.
What distro are you trying out and what are the issues you're seeing between preview on USB vs install?
Been trying to install mint on an old laptop and it just gets into a crash/boot loop after installing. The USB preview on the other hand appears to work perfectly.
Well, there's this which was the first result in a search for me. I would also make sure that you've allocated at least 500mb to a uefi boot partition, depending on what you meant by "old". I have found that sometimes there's a "secure boot" bootloader and one that just has the distro, but it doesn't mean the one you expect it to be will work. When you boot up at first I would mash the boot options key and see what shows up, if there's multiple options try them one by one. I suspect there's a boot setting in your BIOS that's not letting it boot properly.
Not a good idea since disk writes are being stored in ram
You could put the iso on a hard drive partition and just boot like that to get better performance. Or if you use a distro like puppy linux that run completely in memory and save state to a drive you will get even better preformance and you will be able to save all your changes.
If you want to try to get Linux on the main drive working (since USB works but isn't ideal) there are a few things I encountered.
-some distros just didn't like my hardware. Failed to install, or installed but boot would get errors and halt. The remedy was using an rpm distro rather than deb based (I tried about 10 debs, the rpm ones acknowledged the bios error and moved on)
-secure boot can be a bit of a pain. If you don't want to deal with it, Turnoff secureboot, and in some cases EFI and use legacy BIOS mode.
-if you want Secure boot and EFI. Allow USB boot in BIOS, do the install and ensure it is building a GPT disk with an EFI partition. At the reboot stage it should ask if you want to enroll keys, say yes.
If during reboot it does nothing or boots to windows(assuming you have windows drive). Go into BIOS and choose secure boot option where you can pick which Secure OS it found and move that to top of boot list.
-if it is not those things it is often nvidia on Wayland or X issue on laptops. If you don't want to mess with installing a GPU switcher, you can often set your laptop to discrete graphics before install and bypass the two GPU issues