Hello! The TL;DR is:
I have an m.2 drive that is in a sturdy enclosure that has 1 TB. I have Ventoy with Medicat on there, with some backups of important data.
I still have a lot of room left on there, so I was thinking what else I could do, and the idea of basically installing a Linux Distro to a chunk of free space on there. Maybe Debian/Fedora or Arch.
Is there anything I should be aware of to help not break that system or rapidly kill the drive? It’s not a USB flash drive, it’s a M.2 drive that’s put on a small board that then allows it to talk via USB C/Thunderbolt.
EDIT: Just to be sure, if I use Ventoy’s EFI, do I need to be worried about a conflict with the bootloader of the Linux install?
That’s a good chip. As a rule of thumb, Realtek = best, Asmedia = good, JMicron = garbage. JMicron adapters run super hot and draw a lot of power, leading to low speeds and dropped connections.
The reason I suggested a Live CD with persistence is that they are better at autodetecting stuff on the host machine. You can definitely install an actual system on the SSD but it will make assumptions about things like the GPU for example – won’t expect to have to swap it at boot, you’ll have to do it manually. Or you can run your desktop environment with a pure software driver but that may get a bit annoying at times, depending on what you want to do with it.