Building Debian on USB before migrating to internal drive

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Howdy! First post here. I’d like to start a little project with Debian, but I’m not sure of exactly how to do it.

For some context, I’ve been running Xubuntu on a Chromebook (x86) for a couple months now. I’ve formatted the flash drive I used for it and installed Ventoy onto it. I’m not entirely helpless, but I also did just start. I’m aware of Arch and I’m interested in that kinda DIY distro thing, but I’d prefer to be able to keep using apt and .deb, so… I wanna use Ventoy to run a barebones Debian (probably netinstall), and slowly build it up to a functional state before wiping Xubuntu and installing the Debian build to my internal drive. My main questions are:

  1. Is it viable to do it like this (running Debian with persistence entirely on a USB drive before installing it to my main drive)? If not, what else would you recommend?
  2. How exactly would I do persistence with Debian in this case, and what’s the best way to migrate the installation from the USB to my internal drive when I’m ready?

Advice would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks in advance!

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Welcome to the forums. Yes, it’s technically viable, but not ideal long term. USB persistence is slower and flash drives wear out quickly with lots of package installs and updates.

If your goal is to build a minimal system, it’s probably cleaner to use the Debian netinstall and install directly to the internal drive with only standard system utilities, then build everything up from CLI using apt.

To migrate, you would probably reinstall and then just replicate your packages and configs.

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