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Are you just describing a live boot OS with persistent storage, or am I missing something?
https://www.howtogeek.com/14912/create-a-persistent-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive/
That and making it easy to store settings, passwords, bookmarks, etc, almost how Tails does it
But thats what I seem to be misunderstanding- all of that is specifically the persistent storage?
Yes, all of that is persistence storage.
When you boot, if you choose to use persistence storage by unlocking with password, etc, all your settings, installed app, etc get loaded from it. If you dont, the distro default is set.
If you have used Tails OS, its exactly that, except not hyper focused on anonymity and security requiring Tor to be running to access the network
I read through your post a few times and it seems like you want the option to use your Persistent storage or just use the stick as a default install live boot medium.
If so, have you thought about using any of the live usbs with persistence and just make multiple users. One where persistence is used and encrypted and one that does not have access to the Persistent partition?
Sorry if my writing seems like scribbles, I am not a native English speaker.
Would that work? I will try, thanks
I've never tried it but i don't see why not. Let us know what ends up working for you. Your English reads well to me.
TinyCore does this, I think; by default files and applications go into session storage (cleared on logout), but they can be moved/writted to persistent storage. I have to say I digged it, and I wish the driver and application support was better (but then it wouldn't be so minimal)
Puppy and Porteux
I've only tried Puppy but PorteuX offers more DEs.
Both of these offer persistence. With Puppy you can choose when you shutdown to save. I think PorteuX works the same way.
Soap boxing here but I feel these kinds of use cases is what NixOS is built for.
Declarative config to setup the system, users, and apps.
Declarative and customizable impermanence exactly how you want it.
I use Tails as well but NixOS is my daily driver. Anything not marked explicitly to persist is dropped each reboot. I'm the only user so I keep the last 30 days of non persisted data for like a power outage but that's something I had to go out of my to setup for my use case.
Yeah but is Nix OS going to provide easy to use persistence volume manager in its live mode?
No. Its all text file config. You wouldn't use live CD mode. You define your own how you want it to work.
Its a steep learning curve so if looking for off the shelf solutions, don't use nix. If you need something custom but through a single config paradigm, nix is awesome.
Any other Linux distribution that has a live image.
They were specific in their post.
That is an interesting use case. If I have interpreted your post correctly, you want to boot from a flash drive into a generic default OS or a persistent and encrypted / password protected OS. Doing that on one operating system is quite difficult as far as I know. However, you could dual boot two Fedora installs on one drive (I chose it because it's what I use and I remember that you can set up encryption in the install. You could use whatever.). Basically, flash the installer to the drive you want to use, and to a second drive. Boot into the second drive and flash fedora onto the free space in the first drive, and enable encryption when prompted. The installer is a live boot (at least on the KDE spin) and will functions as the amnesic one. The other will be password protected and remember changes.