For me, I’ve been throwing distros on a spare SSD so I could test run in a proper install, but I’m sure a thumbdrive would be fine. Just keep in mind that you might get some hangs and things will be slower due to the speed of the drive, rather than the inefficiencies of the OS you end up on. If you want to test out specific programs or games or something, you can always do what I did and put them on a separate faster storage drive (I’m on SATA SSD for my OS right now, but am putting other things on NVME).

As I mentioned elsewhere, I still have my Windows on another drive so I can boot to it if I need to, but I honestly haven’t needed to even once since switching, so I’ll probably end up just switching to VM only for anything that requires Windows fairly soon here.

The transition has been much simpler and smoother than I ever had imagined.

Plus these days you can just use AI to scan your entire system in detail and explain where everything is while sending that data back to their creator.

Oh wait, sorry, that’s Windows, my bad.

Absolutely agree, edited post. Was meant as a joke, clearly wasn’t in good taste and I apologize. It’s pretty solid, just not for me.

I don’t think they’re saying it as a problem or trying to argue with you, just stating reality 😅

Right now, I still have Windows as dual boot in case things go sideways or I run into road blocks with work, but my plan is to move all of that to a VM in the near future (and ideally an actual work supplied machine with a KVM eventually). At that point, I could see myself falling back onto something like Pop!_OS as a stable side install if/when my main OS is having issues and I just want to play a game and not bash my head against a console for 5 hours.

Sorry to be so seemingly unfair to Pop OS, what it does it does do quite well, just not for me as a main driver.

You just have to install steam, haha. I got CS2 up and running in 10 minutes 😝

Honestly, it seems really stable and works great, I just hate how…hand holdy it felt for me personally. I think the emoji was a little over the top. My apologies, haha. It’s totally fine for what it is, and if it works for you, that’s fantastic!