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?


The thing is USB sticks are much more unstable than an nvme or something, so you’re more likely to lose your data. They can also be stolen way easier than an nvme or hard drive, but if you encrypt it w/ a strong password that shouldn’t be an issue.
The concept here is that the USB carries the immutable OS image, you make as many copies of it as you need because it’s a fixed image, boots the same every time, “your data” gets stored elsewhere.