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Is there any easy way to install a Linux distribution directly to a USB drive?

I want to install Debian directly onto my USB drive. Is there an easy way to do this directly without having to reboot to run the installer?

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  • Don't do that

    You can but it will be very slow and your drive will die quickly. Alternatively you could make a USB drive with MX Linux and then only save what you need.

    • If the system you have has enough RAM you could load the entire OS to RAM and then change the writeback settings to a high interval

      • Still going to bottleneck and then eventually die

        • dunno, the system might ran out of RAM due to lack of swap, but the drive should be fine due to the limited writes

          • Well no because the cache will fill up faster than writes that are happening. You would be postponing the inevitable.

            The only option is to either reduce the number if writes by using MX Linux on the USB or to get something that can handle the writes like a USB NVMe enclosure

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