Blog post

Portable Linux made easy

Part 1/2 of a series on "Adventures in Linux"

I have a secret,

For the longest time I’ve ran Linux solely on a portable SSD. It has actually been a decent and quite convenient setup, though I have recently moved onto maintaining several Linux computers instead (more on that in another blog post coming soon).

In fact, my first time installing Linux was on this very SSD four years ago. Back then it was mostly an experiment, partially fueled by my lack of knowledge about Linux. I imagined that it’d be difficult to synchronize settings, as that’s what Windows had taught me.

The benefits to running Linux this way are:

• no need to maintain several copies of configs or a dotfiles repository.
• no need for file synchronization between devices.
• only need one Linux install.
• the ability to boot from (largely) any computer.

The downsides are:

• less security, if drive is not encrypted.
• less file reliability, e.g. if you do not make backups you lose all your data if you lose the drive.
• you can disconnect the drive while running the OS, which at best causes funny errors and at worst corrupts your system (Linux does handle most problems on it’s own, though).
• you may, as my peers have been eager to bully me for, forget to bring your operating system with you (traumatic).
• can be too slow (not a problem with good quality external SSDs like mine).

The path

At first, I installed Linux Mint with LUKS encryption. This worked decently after some trial and error and I used it for about a year, but after some mishaps the operating system ended up horribly corrupted.

After that I installed Arch Linux on it, without LUKS. That was my setup for about a year before beginner mistakes caught up with me and made the experience unbearable. I then installed Arch Linux again, in a much cleaner way, which is the configuration I’ve used until recently.

The awakening

Recently I decided it was time for a refresh. This time I didn’t want to bother with installing Arch Linux barebones, so I settled for CachyOS. I fully expected to have to bother with UUIDs and lots of manual setup, but to my surprise, LUKS with CachyOS just works.

Without any fuzz, it boots on any machine. I just had to install both AMD and NVIDIA drivers. This makes it the easiest portable setup I’ve created so far.

There is really only one thing you need to think about when installing it this way, however, and that is to either disconnect all other drives or disable your SATA and NVMe controllers during the install process. This is necessary so that you get an independent bootloader on the drive itself, otherwise it cannot boot on it’s own.

Thanks for reading, I hope you have a great day!

// Embracket