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I currently have a live USB drive that I run in persistent mode. I would like to take advantage of encryption, so I'm looking into switching to a full install.

According to this article, I will be sacrificing hardware compatibility by doing a full install.

Hardware compatibility. When you do a full installation, the installer will customize the system to work well with the current set of hardware. This means that if you use the full install USB on another computer, especially one that uses proprietary video driver, chances are that your Linux won’t run well.

I cannot accept this, as I plan to boot this USB from a variety of different hardware, including future unknown systems.

How can I preserve the wide range of hardware compatibility that I'm afforded with Live + Persistence, but in a full install?

My only idea would be to install some packages like ubuntu-standard casper lupin-casper discover laptop-detect os-prober linux-generic based on this guide, but that guide has a different end goal than what I'm trying to accomplish. I also suspect that simply installing those packages is not all that's needed, and I might very well need to delete/modify some config files that specify hardware, etc.

Matt Zabojnik
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    I have been running Full install USBs for many years and have never had a problem with hardware compatibility. You can even install Nvidia drivers and they will only be loaded when plugged into a machine with Nvidia card. Also see: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1168877/is-there-any-problem-with-a-full-installation-on-a-usb-drive/1168922#1168922 – C.S.Cameron Sep 08 '19 at 16:32
  • The main thing a Full install will not do is install the OS. – C.S.Cameron Sep 08 '19 at 16:38
  • @C.S.Cameron, Makes sense, but then, I could always just bootstrap install anyway, right? Similar to an arch install? (I don't run arch, btw), (I used to, btw) – Matt Zabojnik Sep 08 '19 at 20:27
  • Also, would those packages be useful on a full install? ubuntu-standard casper lupin-casper discover laptop-detect os-prober linux-generic – Matt Zabojnik Sep 08 '19 at 20:49
  • I think nowadays you can make a Ubuntu Minimal install and only add what you will use. Minimum USB size is still ~8GB. You can install any package you want that is in the Ubuntu repositories to a Full install. – C.S.Cameron Sep 08 '19 at 23:11
  • I did a full install. It works great on the machine I did the install on (Macbook Pro) but moving to another (macbook pro) machine, I'm having problems. The system detects no network card, so I'm offline upon boot. On a chromebook, I can't boot at all- even though I can boot live mode. During startup, the system halts without even starting to load vmlinuz or initrd. No errors, just nothing happens. – Matt Zabojnik Sep 10 '19 at 02:51

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