Right. The desktop environment shouldn't make much of a difference with harware compatibility. You can always just install another DE or window manager if you have issues.

I think people are talking about two separate things for this "USB stick Linuxes".

You probably refer to the idea that you have a bootable USB stick that has a normal Linux installation.

Others are most probably referring to how many Linux distros offer the the possibility to put the Linux installation media into a bootable USB stick, and when you boot it, you go to a "live" basic Linux session where you can try out how the system works, and there is also an icon on the desktop with which you can start a proper installation procedure of that Linux system to your hard drive.

I think that latter "live Linux USB" is which by default doesn't save any changes you do, as it is expecting you to install that Linux properly to your local hard drive. You can think as if that Linux is merely running in your RAM, so when you boot the system, you lose all your changes because they were in the RAM only.

I THINK it should be possible to install Linux also on a bootable USB drive so that it runs completely from it (providing the UEFI Secure Boot etc. allows that). In fact I think I have once done that when one of my older laptop's internal hard drive got broken so I installed Linux on a bootable USB stick.

You said you have a 8GB USB stick, but you can always buy a bigger one. I've owned a 128GB USB memory stick for a couple of years already, and I presume they are much cheaper nowadays than what they were when I bought that.
EDIT: So I checked it, and yeah even here you can get a 128GB USB memory stick for like 18 euros. There are 256 and 512GB USB memory sticks as well, but they are much more expensive (over 100 and almost 300 euros, respectively).

However, I don't necessarily recommend running Linux on a USB memory stick at least as a long-term solution because reasons:

1. File operations will probably be quite slow on that USB memory stick.

2. I think USB flash memories are mainly meant for "write once (= rarely), read often", ie. your USB flash memory will break sooner if you constantly keep writing on it. Like if you have a Linux system with its swap file/partition running on it. This is why I decided against running that Linux system from the USB memory stick, in fact i replaced it with a bootable USB hard drive as it is more suitable for constant file write operations.

3. If the reason you want a "portable USB Linux installation" is so that you can use it with several different PCs... I am unsure how well that works, if the hardware configuration keeps changing under the Linux installation. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, dunno.

How about XFCE? :)

That is the "version" of Linux Mint I am using, mainly because it is supposed to use less resources and the graphical user interface feels clear and uncluttered to me.

At some point I tried also MATE and Cinnamon (and KDE? I don't recall if it was separate...) and they just felt unnecessarily "flashy" to me, with animations and shit. I just want to get stuff done, the GUI is mostly just a launcher for me to start applications I want to use (both in Linux and Windows). The less the GUI gets in my way, the better. (And when you become more experienced in Linux, you tend to do more and more stuff in the shell ("command prompt") anyway.)

Like timppu I also highly recommend Linux Mint:

Very beginner/user friendly
Excellent hardware support (No other Linux distribution have worked on all my laptops and desktops out of the box)
Backed up by the Debian/Ubuntu line
Is the best when it comes to setting up gaming, and getting support for it.
Very stable (never once had trouble updating, even the kernel/firmwares).

Lighter desktops might be "lighter" but it's almost of no consequence on a modern computers, Linux Mint with Cinnamon is fast enough.

Live disk / usb is for trying out the distro and checking out hardware support. If everything important work in the Live session then it works when installed also.

There's probably useful information and tools at https://www.pendrivelinux.com/ for those kinds of installations.
If going the persistent USB route, getting a USB stick with good read/write speed helps.

1. Exactly. A live linux disk uses the compressed squash-format and runs mostly from RAM. The installed one relies only on the speed of the USB stick and therefor are painfully slow.

2. USB sticks have a poor reliability/reuseabillity and will get slow pretty fast, especially when writing a lot to it.

3. If one sticks to the same computer then Linux (booting from external drive/stick) will do that just fine. Windows, however, is more "portable" in that aspect (installs drivers+ on the fly better).

I forgot to mention this earlier - but do not turn it off when using Windows, that's going to give you nightmares when trying to boot Windows again. Many modern distros work fine with it on.

And yes, it's great that you've booted your first Linux distro!

timppu, ideally, I'd really like to get it figured out and have the best choice for my needs picked out so that I don't have to change it later, because given my circumstances that would be inconvenient. I'm not really concerned with updates because all I intend to do with this is to use the internet (at least on my computer, but the portable version will actually be disconnected from the internet). I may still try the virtual boxes, but there's a lot of stuff for me to do in general, so I'm just still examining stuff (it always seems to take me about 10 times as long as anyone else to do anything, what with research, testing, analysis of my particular methodology to achieve my goals, etc.).

Cavalary, to clarify, I want it completely installed onto the USB, not just have the installer with the ability to also run it. Why do you miss GoodOldGOG - what was different about that?

Yucaju, to what telemetry are you referring?

Engerek01, I read it directly from the Mint manual, near the bottom of page 6: "If you don't know which edition to use, choose the MATE Edition. It's not as popular as the Cinnamon Edition but it is compatible with a wider variety of hardware
specifications." Then I searched for a comparison of them and found that in terms of speed, compatibility, and reliability, Mate is better than Cinnamon, and that's why all serious users tend to prefer it (their words, not mine). Also, there were images from both and in most cases, they looked almost the same to me (I had expected them to look vastly different), so frankly, I couldn't think of any reason why anyone would prefer Cinnamon.

huppumies, perhaps, but I don't want to drag it out a long time trying to install and use and configure a bunch of different stuff until I find the one that's best for me, and I also don't want to stick with something that isn't. I'd rather at least have some idea of what's probably best and start with that, then if for some reason it isn't, I'll go down the list of what I think are the best options until I find the one that actually is. But ideally I'd like to get it right the first time.

timppu, yeah I get the impression that people don't realize that I actually want to install it onto the USB. I know I can buy bigger USB sticks, but like I said, I want to be able to make as many copies of this as I want, and I don't feel like using an unnecessarily expensive one each time. For the portable usage of Linux, I don't really have a choice but to use a USB stick, because that's the only way I'll be able to accomplish what I'm trying to do, and as for writing to the stick a bunch, tat shouldn't be a problems, because nothing will be written to it once it's set up properly - other sticks will hold saved data. The only reason why I can't just use an installation stick and have it run in "live" mode is because I need to also initially install some custom software onto it, but after that, nothing should ever be written to it (in fact, I'd make the whole stick read-only, if there's a way to do that). And yes, it must be able to adapt to any hardware (really just keyboards, mice and monitors though). And I'm not really worried about the speed of file operations in this case. I haven't really considered XFCE because everything I saw seemed to imply the other two were better, but they didn't really describe that one. I'll look into it, thanks. I sort of feel the same way about GUIs though, which is why my favorite version of Windows is 2000, but I don't mind flash, unless it hogs resources or messes up anything.

sanscript, I don't actually even need it for most of those purposes, but that's good to know I guess. From what I've looked into, I'd still choose Mate over Cinnamon, but I guess that's a personal preference. As for the stuff about running it live to test, if you're implying that I could test it on different hardware to make sure it works, that's of limited use to me, because like I said, I intend to make copies and give them to different people, without having any idea what hardware they're using, and expect it to work (these people have varying degrees of computer literacy and probably have never used Linux before, so I can't expect them to fix driver issues themselves).

huppumies, I'll check out that link - thanks!

sanscript, I don't think it'll be too slow, because the way it'll be used, a person will just boot into the OS, open a specific program, and then use it to open files on other devices (possibly USB sticks or even the HD), and when doing so, there's so much data encoding that the speed of loading the file becomes insignificant by comparison, anyway. As I've said, they won't be written to once I have everything set up. As for it not installing drivers on the fly, that's why I need drivers which are generic enough just to be able to use any keyboard and standard mouse (I wouldn't think that would be a problem), and monitor (that's the potential issue, really, but I don't need OpenGL or anything - just to display the OS and normal programs with windows and stuff). It doesn't even need sound, printers/scanners, game input devices, or any other hardware. It's good to know what I shouldn't turn off secure boot mode, but then it seems to mean that whenever I want to boot Linux, I have to go into the control panel in windows, then restart into the advanced startup routine, and load it form there, which means if the computer's off, I can't just stick in the Linux drive and start it to boot into it - I have to go into Windows first, so that's a bit inconvenient.

EDIT: By the way, does anyone know, if I'm running Linux and I want to save or overwrite a file on a hard drive partition on which Windows is installed, will that mess it up? It wouldn't be a system file, but just a regular one. It's Windows 10, and it's using NTFS. Also, it may need to do the same thing on a MacOS drive or other versions of Windows.

Ah, you probably read the documentations here These are old guides. The latest page says "If you are unsure which desktop to choose start with the Cinnamon edition." Which you can find here

Why? Because Mate used to be the default Mint desktop between 2006 and 2011. So it was the focus of development and hence stable. Now, however, Cinnamon is the flagship of Mint and as the page says Cinnamon is primarily developed for and by Linux Mint. I've been using Mint since version 17 and can say that Cinnamon sucked in 17 and 18. But they fixed almost all problems as of 19.3 and it is rock solid.

Also, Mate sucks big time on stability and performance according to my own personal experience. The interface, menus, folder navigation was literal torture. On Cinnamon, you can use CTRL+ALT+ESC to refresh Cinnamon and CTRL+ALT+Backspace to restart the system. I don't remember if you can do this on Mate but I remember I had to long-press the power button when it crashed. It wasn't fun to see the files in a folder differently every time I check either. But of course, your experience may be better.

You can do it safely

Engerek01, why would they put the old guide in the primary section of their downloads? I just went straight to their website and downloaded it, and that's the guide it suggested. And the link that you gave me which is supposed to say that Cinnamon is better actually says this: "Although it misses a few features and its development is slower than Cinnamon’s, MATE runs faster, uses less resources and is more stable than Cinnamon." Also, why would you see files differently every time?

Dark_art_, thanks for the info.

And here's the big problem:

I just tried actually running Mint Mate for the first time (the previous time I had just gotten to the main screen where I could choose to run normally us use compatibility mode - which I guess is like safe mode, and by the way, it didn't look like it does it the images printed in the guides, because all I saw was a black screen with a few lines of text, highlighting whichever one was selected, and I could navigate up and down the list using the arrow keys).

So this time I said to run it. Then it printed a ton of lines of text, and at some point froze for a long time, with most of the top portion of the screen looking weirdly corrupted, like it shrunk a bunch of text lines very small or something, so it mostly looked like a bunch of dots. Then eventually after several minutes it progressed a bit further and printed more text at the bottom, but the top still looked somewhat corrupted.

Then after waiting for several more minutes, it finally displayed the desktop, in 5 small images along the bottom of the screen, and they looked corrupted as well (like it was printing alternate scan lines or something, and some of the coloration might have been wrong but I'm not sure). Any text was too small to read and with half of the scan lines missing it was illegible, anyway.

I know that it was running though, because I moved the mouse around (though I couldn't see the cursor) and sometimes it would highlight an icon. I couldn't seem to get anything to open by double-clicking, but if I clicked on the icon I think it seemed to want me to change its name, but I'm not sure. And if I right-clicked I got a menu, which of course I couldn't read, but I could move the invisible cursor up and down to select various things.

Anyway, I ultimately had to press the restart button on my computer. Frankly, I was hoping Linux would be more pleasant to use than that. I had hoped that I could at least see the desktop on the full screen, with legible text and a visible cursor.

By the way, I have a GeForce RTX 2060 and a widescreen monitor with a maximum resolution of 2560x1440, if that helps.

I believe you are already experiencing what I've warned you about. Nowadays MATE is for old Linux users who want the original flavor. And the Mint website is a total mess, with tons of old and wrong information. Always trust experience over what was written 3 years ago. Linux mint in 2020 is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE it was 3 years ago.

I think you have 2 choices...

You can insist on using the MATE edition and hope to survive the frustration.

Or you can listen to our initial advice and download the Cinnamon ISO. Make a live USB with Rufus and see the difference in a few minutes with your own eyes without changing or risking a single thing.

Engerek01, I didn't realize that. Silly me, I thought they'd at least provide accurate information about their own product on their own website. How idiotic is it not to do that? I'll try Cinnamon next...



Anyway, I forgot to mention that I had made a new partition in Windows, and labeled it "Linux", so that I could install onto that, and then afterwards install onto a portable USB stick.

Anyway, I tried again but this time used compatibility mode, and it actually loaded the desktop and everything! So I'm happy about that (though I worry why it didn't work in the normal mode - is compatibility mode the same thing as safe mode?).

While I was there I tried to set up an internet connection, since I'll ultimately need one, and I couldn't seem to figure it out. It wanted me to set some options but I wasn't sure what to set. In Windows I just have to say connect, and type in the network password, and it's done.

Then after that I tried to install it. I set the language and a couple simple things like that, but then it asked me if I wanted to unmount a drive, and I wasn't sure whether I should do that in this circumstance, and then it said it wanted to install onto the hard drive and said I could either erase the whole drive or install it alongside Windows, so I chose the option to NOT erase.

Then it didn't seem to let me choose which partition to use, or at least there wasn't one listed which was labeled "Linux", even though one such drive appeared on the desktop in Mate. So I checked some option to show all extra partitions, and it showed the main/root one or whatever it's called, and a recovery partition that I didn't even know I had (it doesn't appear in Windows for some reason, though actually I think it did appear when I made the new partition), and several others (I thought my drive just had one partition up until I made a second one today) but again it didn't specifically say that one of them is called Linux.

So I was afraid to install onto a partition without being certain it's the right one. So I just told it to restart, and then it kept printing text endlessly, filling the screen, until I pressed the restart button on the computer.

What should I do? [Engerek01 suggested trying Cinnamon, which I'll do next, but I'm worried that I might run into the same problem]

Like I wrote earlier - you either need to set the BIOS which one you want to boot first. If you select USB over internal harddrive it will try USB BEFORE trying the internal one (every time), or, press the F key to get the boot menu every time you start the computer.

No problem, I have a NTFS drive that I share between Linux and 10.

But, if you want Windows 10 to read ext3/ext4 filesystem, you need to install a driver for it. http://www.ext2fsd.com/
https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

The first screen you see, can change if it boots on UEFI or BIOS/legacy mode, see attached pictures.

Sometimes, when bootimg things can look weird but if it looks "corrupt" on the desktop you probably have some errors in the USB pen (wich happen very frequently). You mention previously the checksum failed... Linus Mint have a "integrity check" option, please see all the attached pictures.

BTW, on my computer, the live USB boots on 30 seconds using a USB 2.0 port and pen drive.

Edit: I have a feeling you wont like anything Linux related, you only get frustrated. For exemple, C:, D: and E: don't exist on Linux, they are labeled diferently. sda1, sdb0 etc...
My advice is to TRY things, get to know the OS, at least the basic stuff before install.

Oh, that's too painful for those that are somewhat impatient... like me :D

Also related (important to know):
https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/linux-filesystem-explained/

Welcome to mainstream Linux. Where documentation is garbage and everything sucks so much that they constantly rewrite it and thus everything changes in three years and three-year-old documentation is horrendously out of date :P I bet three years later they're going to tell you cinnamon is unstable and only good for old users and the kool kids use bogemon now. It's chaos out there, you're gonna love it. Maybe.