I find myself with a need for a portable, non-installed OS, with persistent storage. To the best of my knowledge, there's no simple way to put Zorin in that state, or I'd just use that. I require the ability to install additional applications (specifically ProtonVPN; I can probably do without others), so Debian derivatives are preferred for ease there, but that's not a requirement. LUKS is a must, for persistent storage at least, and for everything if it's not "amnesiac" like Tails.
Tails would be the obvious choice, but I don't require TOR, and TOR will get in the way of some uses. It's configured to expect TOR, and I don't want to second guess parts of the OS with which I'm unfamiliar.
Knoppix seemed to lack a USB image. CD or DVD they had, but I seem to recall some bootable images for other stuff not being shared between optical and flash media.
I would prefer feature rich over super light, so I haven't looked at Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. I can reasonably expect not to be running this on anything with fewer than 32 GB of RAM. That said, if the best overall choice is super light and it will install and run ProtonVPN, I don't mind. I have no preference for DE for this purpose.
Thoughts? I once had Ubuntu 22.04 doing what I wanted by installing it to an SD card, but it turned out not to be very portable. My Steam Deck had no complaints. My mini PC got nowhere with it.
It should be simple, using Ventoy with persistence.
That said, when it comes to persistent USB's, I go with the idea of the lighter the distro, the better. MXLinux, Antix, being top choices IMO.
You may prefer to just go with Zorin OS Lite.
If I go the Zorin USB with Ventoy route, unless I'm misunderstanding something or don't know a needed trick, I'm not going to be able to get ProtonVPN on there. The ISO itself isn't writable, and I'm unaware of a means to get ProtonVPN going from loose files in persistent storage. If I do a normal install of Zorin Lite pointing to a USB drive (this is what I did with Ubuntu), I can install ProtonVPN normally, but if Ubuntu 22.04 is any indicator, it won't be very portable. It also wouldn't work with Ventoy, since the install would be a normal drive with Zorin, not an ISO or IMG.
I've ignored Kali because I understood it to be primarily for pentesting, but if it's suitable for more normal use, I have no reason to care if it includes utilities I won't use. I'll take a closer look at MX Linux after work tomorrow, thanks.
I remember in the past when doing this I used Slax. They offer a slackware and debian base, so you could just select the debian base. It exists basically to do exactly what you're talking about, I think. Unless I've misunderstood, which with my lack of current sleep, is very possible lol.
Interestingly, I couldn't even get it (Slax) on a USB. They don't provide a USB friendly ISO, only DVD and CD. For USB, they tell you to copy a directory off the ISO onto the USB, and then run... a batch file. There's an .sh file with the same name, but it's never mentioned. I set execute permissions on it, ran it under the same circumstances the batch was to be run, and it told me to see the error "above" and then hit enter to close the window.
There was no error above.
MX Linux seemed to be going the right way, but persistence has to be set in the bootloader menus it looks like (not a problem), and not on the actual MX-Linux flash drive (defeats the purpose). (I tried adding a new partition on the drive for it, and it didn't like that at all--rejected it as an option at boot.)
I'm honestly pretty surprised here. It's entirely possible I'm missing something, but it seems like the "TAILS but don't do TOR" use case I imagined was moderately common isn't. Kali next, I suppose.
I know you don't want TOR, but the content is well worth reading. If it was me I would use two pen/thumb drives. One for the live .iso and the second encrypted to save data to.
I actually had some time to look at this and see. It appears to be broken as of a little over a year ago. I saw a thread about Rufus by the Slax dev and it seems its been broken since then. Might not be worth the headache at all anymore. Little bit of a shame, it was a nice little tiny distro for purposes like you want but I guess not anymore.
I can get it working in a VM as usual, it just appears to be something regarding the actual boot files it's trying to create that fails every time.
...I try not to be ungrateful to people providing free stuff in their free time, especially when it's something far beyond the skill of most people. But a year is a hell of a long time to leave your install script entirely broken. Thanks for the recommendation regardless; I would've liked to try it.
Thanks in general to everyone with suggestions, and particularly @Aravisian -- After Slax messed with me, I prodded at MX Linux some more. Polish level is good, but for a portable USB with persistence, the OOBE has some issues. I had to go digging in tools and use Live USB Maker on one USB to create a second USB that would work. The problem was that I was not aware they had an appimage to make the USB until after I'd followed their more visible instructions to use dd. dd doesn't make a writable USB I guess, which left me having to:
Explore MX Tools
Try Live USB Maker (I thought that's what I'd already done with dd to use my MX Linux USB to create... a second, writable MX Linux USB
Use RemasterCC to set up persistence (I had no interest in setting up a remaster, so it was chance that I tried it)
Get everything set up believing in good faith that I had persistence.
Restart
...have no persistence
Discover persistence options in advanced setup in GRUB
Turn THOSE on, as well as the option to save the last used settings
Set it all up again
Although there's a boot options item in MX Tools, it doesn't just allow you to select persistence settings like the menu in GRUB does; you have to know which kernel argument to use. It's basically a graphical editor for /etc/default/grub.
There were also some pain points with ProtonVPN, but that's Proton's fault as far as I'm concerned; there's no excuse for a degraded experience when not using GNOME. (I had to set up KDE Wallet, KGPG, and so on.)
I imagine MX Linux is significantly smaller than Tails, so I imagine they're prioritizing flexibility over ease, but Tails handles this setup much more cleanly--if only it weren't married to TOR.
Anyway, thanks again. It took some doing, but MX Linux meets my needs.
I like KDE. I wouldn't fuss about it becoming an official option for Zorin, or Zorin's older glibc keeping me out of 6 if I didn't. As a matter of fact, the reason I had to manually tinker is because MX Linux disables KDE Wallet by default, just as you do.
Without KDE Wallet, Proton VPN complains that it wants to create a keyring. GNOME handles this with Passwords and Keys; Plasma with KDE Wallet. I lay this at Proton's feet again for expecting GNOME only.
As for XFCE, I have nothing against it and nothing for it. I'm not after the world's lightest system, and I know I like Plasma. This wasn't a distro hopping experiment; I wanted a portable, persistent, encrypted system. Using XFCE would've added another complication in learning new menus and workflows. Heck, the complaints about KDE Plasma's options menus make more sense to me now since spending time in 5--they're somewhat improved in 6.
Until I got MX Linux set up, that would've gone to the top of my list. Now it's being kept in mind if I run into a shortcoming in MX Linux in the future. Thanks.
I did think of creating a live USB a long time ago but deferred from trying due the 'shortening of life' due to continuous re-writes. Which is why I suggested 2 USB's.
I've got MX-Linux KDE on a spare hard drive I put in the hotswap bay.
I'm not terribly concerned with that. As you might imagine, it's not going to be my daily driver. It's also possible to configure such that anything other than /home gets saved only on command, and I can disable the persist kernel arguments at boot if I'm not going to be retaining anything.
There is some degree of difference between a live USB distro designed to be one and installing a distribution that writes freely to a flash drive. There are options allowing writes to occur only at shutdown and/or manual commit. Obviously, keeping /root and /home both in RAM may require quite a lot of RAM depending on the task.
to be honest, simpler to buy a cheap pc and treat it like a usb. many are tuned for both windows and linux... the path of least resistance with the most payoff.
It's also the path that doesn't solve the problem. I have PCs everywhere. I need to be able to use the same system, with the same software and files, anywhere I have a PC, without installing stuff on that PC, and without leaving history, cookies, or files from work on it. I could carry a laptop, but then I have to predict the need for that laptop on any given day, whereas I can just slip a flash drive in a pocket. I don't have to stress over leaving it unattended for the same reason.
Additionally, I've got two current PCs, a mini-PC, a laptop, a work laptop, and five out of date PCs lying around in a very small apartment--and until Thursday before last, I had two MORE work PCs in my apartment. I really don't need one more thing to have to find space for, plug in and find space for peripherals.
the big picture