Hello everyone. So I’ve been using EndeavourOS on my desktop for a couple of months, and I’ve been loving it as my first experience with Linux. I’m currently dualbooting it alongside windows on my desktop, off a partition on my secondary (non-windows) ssd. I partitioned 150gb for it when I I first installed. I’ve recently been wanting to install Linux on my laptop as well. I have a spare M.2 SSD lying around, but my laptop only has one M.2 slot, I’d like to keep windows on it for the time being and I’d like to avoid buying a larger SSD. I also have a M.2 SSD usb enclosure.
I had an idea. Would it be possible to setup a portable EndeavourOS installation on my SSD in the external enclosure, and be able to boot off it on both my desktop and my laptop? I feel this solution would be elegant as I would have to manage one Linux installation, restore the 150gb I have partitioned on my desktop and not have to buy a larger ssd for my laptop just to dualboot on it. Both my laptop and desktop have Nvidia GPUs, with the desktop being an RTX 2080 and the laptop being a RTX 3050.
Is this solution a good idea/is it possible to setup a stable environment? What are the challenges I’d face when it comes to booting/the bootloader? What about the nvidia dkms drivers, would that work across both machines? It would be great if I could set this up so thank you to anyone who can offer advice on this process.
I have EnOS on a USB drive, boots fine on my laptop with nVidia drivers, unfortunately it is the only device with them. I would just try it, not going to hurt if it doesn’t work!
The only pitfall off the top of my head would be if you have local drives in the fstab mounted by UUID - they won’t align between machines and so won’t mount correctly on boot, so you may have to mount local drives manually afterwards (or mount by /dev/whatever if you’re lucky enough that they currently match between machines, and cross your fingers that they don’t get reassigned along the way).
I’d also be wary of the potential bottleneck caused by running everything through a USB port, in theory USB 3.* should be plenty snappy but in practice I find it rarely lives up to its spec
Thanks for the reply! Would I have to configure anything on my desktop or laptop to be able to dual boot windows again? Or will my windows installs on the old C drives be visible instantly when I boot off the external SSDs? Would I just be able to wipe the old linux install on my desktop, and then boot off of the SSD and be able to boot back into Windows again?
@ashroof
You can do it but it’s not something i recommend as you will run into various issues. Installed on the hardware you are using it on is much better.
If you’ll ultimately only have one OS per drive then the absolute braindead simplest way of doing it is just hitting whatever hotkey is relevant for your machine’s BIOS/UEFI boot menu and selecting the relevant drive. Once you’re happy the external drive is working the way you want it to then you can just wipe the Linux partition on the local drive and be done with it.
You won’t need to do anything fancy with bootloaders if you’re only using one OS per drive, once the machine has been told which drive you want then the relevant bootloader installed for the OS on that drive will handle the rest.
As @ricklinux has elaborated though, just because it should work doesn’t mean it will be a perfect experience, so be sure to test thoroughly before you commit to anything
That makes sense, I like the idea but it seems like it would be a hassle to setup and may not work how I want it to. Would you just recommend installing Endeavour on the external SSD, but only using it on my laptop and not trying to use it for other devices? And if so, could I partition say half of the external SSD to use as regular storage to move things between linux and windows? If so, are there anythings I should take into account, like what would be the best file system to choose for that partition for the smoothest experience? Thanks for the help
