rotopenguin

Btrfs. Just format as one big partition (besides that little EFI partition of course) and don't worry about splitting up your disk into root and home. Put home on its own subvolume so that root can be rolled back separately from it. You can have automatic snapshots, low-overhead compression, deduplication, incremental backups. Any filesystem can fsck its own metadata, but btrfs is one of the few that also cares if your data is also intact.

There should be exactly one game allowed to keep its "fuck your accessibility, git gud nüb" difficulty, and its name is Zadette.

The reason you can't is "because Intel deliberately designed it that way". Back when USB was just a notion, PDAs were a really cool thing. There was apparently concern at Intel that someday these little things might be all that someone might own. You might connect your PDA directly to the printer, rather than syncing it to your Intel Desktop and printing from there. You might connect your PDA to the modem and collect electronic mailographs directly, instead of syncing with a PC. If you could do enough without the PC middleman, you might even skip on buying an Intel computer altogether.

So, Intel baked into the protocol anything they could think of to make peer-to-peer communications impossible in USB, make life easy for the singular PC communications master, and put a timing onus on devices that forced them to be dumbed-down state machines instead of computers in their own right.

Professional accreditation is such a racket lol. I've seen plenty of tax courses with "the last tax year that so-and-so was relevant was 1988, NEVERTHELESS this will be on the test." Zero effort goes into updating the material, just keep on reselling the same crap to a captive audience forever.

And if you want to get really funky, Intel also does their JTAG over USB. They are quite secretive about it, your bios should have turned it off, but it is there.

I think that the Deck is able to connect as a device (MTP or CDC?), but there has been trouble with that so the current OS disables it.

I'm quite sure that all gigabit+ ethernet auto-negotiates. There is no shared ether, there are no dedicated tx/rx pairs anymore. It's all point-to point and constantly negotiating to make the most of every wire it's got.

A dumb little stick is fine for the occasional "fix something up" or "take a snapshot of a Windows drive because dd is objectively better than anything that Windows itself could do". A live iso distro precludes me from adding a handful of other useful tools.

Late breaking edit : What I ended up doing was formatting a stick as small EFI / 5GB btrfs / rest exfat. Chattr +c the btrfs, and debootstrap in there. Put rEFInd on the efi and tell its conf file about the stick (or maybe it'll detect). Put non-free-firmware & stable-security into apt's sources.list. In a chroot shell, apt get live-task-non-free-firmware-pc gdm3 systemd-timesyncd linux-image-amd64 locales gnome-terminal. Add other tools to suit taste. Fix up the fstab, make /tmp tmpfs, make the exfat mount nofail. With btrfs compression, I can have a gnome environment inside of 2.5GB. It would be even more smol if I could figure out booting directly into Weston.

I would like to install a distro on a USB stick, without it doing something stupid to my internal drive's EFI.

I can kinda see "shot an old horse or two" as being a positive thing, okay you got over the squeamishness of it and did a sick animal a mercy.

Winging a goat and gosh I gotta go get more ammo to finish this one off, well that's starting to get a little peculiar.

LIKING IT SO MUCH THAT YOU WENT OUT AND GOT A NEW PUPPY SO YOU COULD DO IT AGAIN, well hoooly fuck we are getting into something entirely else now aren't we?

The magic missile knows where it is at all times, because it knows where it isn't.