Update: thank you ALL for all your input! 💐 After some back and forth with @thorry@feddit.org , I decided to simply swap between the two capture cards whenever I need to, in order to make room for my old 3080 and call it a day. This way, I won’t have to spend any more money on this project and I retain the processing power of the 3080 when I start encoding my raw captures.

I am just about to set up my new Linux machine, which will be used to convert analog video and audio to digital video and audio. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t run the system off of a live USB stick (say, a good quality one from Sandisk), that is, without installing Linux on the hard drive and not setting up a boot partition, a system partition, and all that?


Also the smaller OS’s (puppy linux, tailOS) that can run entirely in RAM are going to be fast when it comes to anything but disk reads.
I also thought about running from RAM but I guess the transcription might be needing the RAM too. So that route probably depends on how much RAM there is available