Linux

I've run systems directly from USB (installed there, not live distro) and here's the hiccups I had:

• Slow: USB drives aren't anywhere near as fast as an SSD. Even USB3 drives are far slower than an a SATA SSD. USB3 is 5 Gbps while SATA-III is 6, but the thumb drive controller is often the bottleneck.
• Heat: To get better performance, I bought a higher-end USB flash drive. That increased performance a bit, but the thumb drive ran very hot.
• Durability: USB drives aren't really meant for sustained operation like an SSD. Every time I've tried to run a system full time (granted, that's only been twice), the USB drive eventually crapped out. See also: heat. -Fragile: May not be an issue for a desktop, but with a USB sticking out of a laptop full time, it's going to have very high chances of getting knocked around potentially damaging the drive and/or the USB port.

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.

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.

Not a good idea since disk writes are being stored in ram

Which distro are you using? As others have already said, you probably won't have an easy way to persistently store any data.

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?

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.

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 ?

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