I had such a system, many years ago. Two pluggable cassettes with SCSI drives. It was working quite well, but the boot frickery was annoying over time. Nowadays, I boot my desktop only after kernel updates.
This is Linux country. On a quiet night, you can hear Windows reboot.
Gosh, that takes me back a looong way to the days of Tandon Computers who had internal removable drives.
Didnāt they look something like this?
Yes, I have a caddy in my tower desktop that supports 4 hot swappable 2.5in sata drivesā¦ hd or ssd.
I dont boot from itā¦ I use it for user data backups. When I finish work for the day I rsync home directory, or other data areas onto swappable drives.
Kind of like a hand driven raid setup
I dont use it for system backupsā¦ they are always Clonezilla to a usb drive
I had some trouble with the sata drivers in some distrosā¦ had to fiddle kernel parameters.
No need to remove or replace the hard drives just put them both in your computer tower and the use the bios to boot to either or the boot grub . But easy with a tower more complex for space on a laptop
But my prefered solution is just to drop windows
This way of thinking leads to wasting resources, and itās just the way of thinking of MS (Windows).
āWe have plenty of resources, so no problem to require more memory, bigger space, faster CPU.ā
Well, my work laptopās old SSD is still my ābackup OSā. I chroot to it few times a year and update the system, not the home folder or anything. Itās just one more layer of security for my work system. It is for the OS, not for the files I need in case of total disaster. Files have other backup plan. This is only for work, my home systems are not that important.
I applaud your effort! Iāve always preferred natively installed software as a matter of course. Itās one of the reasons I like my Arch-based Garuda-KDE-Lite GNU/Linux system. Every installed āpackageā is built/updated/patched on my systemās hardware by the garuda-update terminal app whenever I run a system update. All I have to enter in the terminal to update my system is āupdā, and the utility takes care of requesting my password for administrative authorization. When I want to install a new app, I use pacman with the ā-Sā option, and the new package is built and installed on my system in the same manner. I do have pamac installed, but I seldom use it, other than to search for a package whose correct name I donāt know. For example, I can search for ālibreofficeā, and all packages whose names start with that string will be listed at the top of the results list. Since I use the libreoffice-fresh package, if I didnāt already know about that name, I could use pamac to find it. Beyond the ease of searching, I seldom use the GUI app for package management.
With all this said, I have been known to use flatpaks and appimages from time to time when something I want isnāt available in any other format, but I always search for a new-to-me app using pamac first (Garuda repos), then on the appimage website, and finally on the flatpak site. Note that I never search for snap packages because Iāve always been able to find anything I want using one of the above-mentioned formats
These are my thoughts on the topic,
Ernie
There is a good reason for doing that, other than preference. Packages from a distroās package system have been checked for compatability and dependencies. The entire distro is designed to work together. Debian is particularly good at making sure everything works together, and Debian-derived distros inherit this.
So do many/most other distributions. I find, for the most part, that my Garuda-KDE-Lite installation works well, with everything I install from the Garuda repositories working very compatibly together.
Ernie
Garuda is Arch based. As long as you minimise use of AUR it should be OK
I use one Arch based distro (Artix) and it has not had any trouble.
These things are improving.
There is another Arch based distro (Cachyos) that is very popular so it mustvbe stable.
Debian has the reputation for stability, others are catching up.
Debian is one of the earliest distributions created, and it is community-based and the Debian community is very dedicated to their distribution. Thatās the main reason for its longevity and success.
I avoid using the AUR whenever I can. Garuda provides a repository that includes many AUR packages, but the development team checks them out, and keeps them as up to date and compatible as possible, so using packages from the chaotic-AUR repository is about as safe as using packages from the rest of the Garuda repos. So far, Iāve been able to get everything I need from the regular Garuda repositories, one of which is chaotic-AUR.
Ernie
Yeah, I use some Linux like this, but itās not as hard as they say. Only thing is that you need to change the target device for loads of installations and for GRUB, and need to shutdown before removing device, but otherwise it works.
Yes you cant hotplug a drive if it has the OS on it.
I use pluggable sata drives but only for data.
