Question: I recently purchased an SSD and was wondering if there was an Operating System that allows you to swap between two different machines essentially sharing one partition? Perhaps multiple hardware profiles? In this case the machines are my laptop and desktop.
It would be great to take advantage of the performance of my desktop and then when I need to be mobile just put the SSD into my laptop and go. I don’t believe Windows plays nice with this concept for reason of licensing, i.e. major hardware changes triggering reactivation, etc.
Denser, faster, more affordable, and smaller storage could make this a viable option for end users without relying on “cloud” technologies for syncing apps and files. I prefer to have literal, physical control over my information.
Answer: Most standard Linux distros will allow you to do this – provided they are the same architecture (eg Both are Intel 32bit or 64bit machines). ?
Linux typically packs all the common drivers you might need as modules as part of the intitial boot process, and there is no “system lock in” to check if the hardware is the same as previous boots.
I have, on multiple occassions, pulled drives out of 1 system, plugged them into another and everything just worked. ?In fairness, I do try and keep my hardware fairly standard (intel chipset motherboards with intel CPU) which makes it that much simpler, but certainly this can work on more diverse hardware. ?
My distro of choice is Ubuntu, but I’m confident Redhat based installs will do the same thing – anything where you don’t need to compile a custom kernel should work.