WetGeek Makes me wonder what separates Zephix from all of the "live" versions that allow us to explore a distro before clicking on the "Install OS" button.
Persistence, the ability to save changes back to the USB. Live sessions are not persistent.
WetGeek Or simply selecting the USB drive as the target for an installation. ... The result is not fast at all ... Because of the relatively slow read/write speed of a USB compared with an SSD, the OS would need to be one that's inherently small and fast.
Few distros are sufficiently light weight to run acceptably off a USB or external SSD. I'm still exploring Zephix to see if I can figure out exactly how it is put together, but I think that Zephix uses a minimal kernel (as in IoT) and just the bare bones of Debian, coupled with (if installed) desktop.zx, which is a minimal LXQT build with a few basic tools.
WetGeek Vivaldi .. would provide web browsing, feeds, note taking, and email -- that you could use anywhere there's a computer.
You might try to set up a Puppy Portable, Slax Portable, Knoppix Portable or Kali Portable build with Vivaldi on a USB with persistence. I used Kali Portable (stripped down to the network tools) at the railroad, but I haven't tried any of the others.
Persistence, portability, or the fact that Zephix is light enough to run acceptably off a USB isn't what interests me about Zephix. What interests me is that Zephr is a baby step toward modular OS design, which is something I've been thinking about for years.
Flatpak and Snap were supposed to be a move in that direction, and to some extent they are. A while back, I experimented with stripping down a distro to its bare essentials (terminal, text editor, browser and a few basic system tools) and then installing everything else I wanted to use as a Flatpak instead of starting out with the whole banana included in most distros. It was an interesting experiment and I learned a lot.
Zehpix goes a step further, though, because it starts with a minimal kernel/OS and you build from that point (for example, if you want the full driver set for laptops/desktops, install firmware.zx). I'll never use it in real life, unless I don't have my laptop with me, my iPhone dies and my car loses internet, but I'm interested in the direction that Zehpix is taking.
My head is stuck "back in the future" when I used operating systems for mainframe and midrange computers. The operating systems were modular, starting with a minimal core to operate the hardware, adding components and functionality as needed. It made for a very efficient computing environment. Desktops (Apple, Windows, Linux) all bundle way too much in my opinion.
