I understand the need for something like Tails OS and I am glad it exists. But I am looking for a distro that is not as hyper focused on extreme privacy and anonymity and is designed to be sort of like mobile computing.
I know many(if not all) distros can be live booted. I am also aware the likes of MX Linux and others leave unallocated space that can be formatted and used for this purpose but what I am looking for is this process being stream lined.
In Tails, there is a dedicated “Persistent Volumes Manager” app where you select what information you wish to put in your persistence storage. For example, you can choose to store your settings, installed apps, wifi passwords, app configuration, browser bookmarks and other useful stuff. Persistence storage is optionally encrypted to prevent sensitive data from being extracted from stolen flash drive.
When you boot up, you will be asked whether you wish to unlock persistence volume or not. If you agree, all your settings will be loaded into current live boot session, if not, it wont be.
The distro does not act or try to pretend like Tails but rather acts and feels like a standard linux distro, not hyper focused on anonymity, maximizing user convinience over privacy and security.
Essentially: 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.
When persistence folder is unlocked, there could be a Persistence folder in the live user’s home directory where we can store files we wish to persist between reboot. Everything outside is non persistent.
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
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.